Evolutionary biologists have long endeavored to document how many species exist on Earth, to understand the processes by which biodiversity waxes and wanes, to document and interpret spatial patterns of biodiversity, and to infer evolutionary relationships. Despite the great potential of this knowledge to improve biodiversity science, conservation, and policy, evolutionary biologists have generally devoted limited attention to these broader implications. Likewise, many workers in biodiversity science have underappreciated the fundamental relevance of evolutionary biology. The aim of this article is to summarize and illustrate some ways in which evolutionary biology is directly relevant We do so in the context of four broad areas: (1) discovering and documenting biodiversity, (2) understanding the causes of diversification, (3) evaluating evolutionary responses to human disturbances, and (4) implications for ecological communities, ecosystems, and humans We also introduce bioGENESIS, a new project within DIVERSITAS launched to explore the potential practical contributions of evolutionary biology In addition to fostering the integration of evolutionary thinking into biodiversity science, bioGENESIS provides practical recommendations to policy makers for incorporating evolutionary perspectives into biodiversity agendas and conservation. We solicit your involvement in developing innovative ways of using evolutionary biology to better comprehend and stem the loss of biodiversity.; Yale University; Yale University; Kyushu University; Kyushu University; EDIT; EDIT; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP); FAPESP; Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP); Universidade de São Paulo (USP); CNPq; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq); DIVERSITAS; DIVERSITAS

An organism is built through a series of contingent factors, yet it is determined by historical, physical, and developmental constraints. A constraint should not be understood as an absolute obstacle to evolution, as it may also generate new possibilities for evolutionary change. Modularity is, in this context, an important way of organizing biological information and has been recognized as a central concept in evolutionary biology bridging on developmental, genetics, morphological, biochemical, and physiological studies. In this article, we explore how modularity affects the evolution of a complex system in two mammalian lineages by analyzing correlation, variance/covariance, and residual matrices (without size variation). We use the multivariate response to selection equation to simulate the behavior of Eutheria and Metharia skulls in terms of their evolutionary flexibility and constraints. We relate these results to classical approaches based on morphological integration tests based on functional/developmental hypotheses. Eutherians (Neotropical primates) showed smaller magnitudes of integration compared with Metatheria (didelphids) and also skull modules more clearly delimited. Didelphids showed higher magnitudes of integration and their modularity is strongly influenced by within-groups size variation to a degree that evolutionary responses are basically aligned with size variation. Primates still have a good portion of the total variation based on size; however...

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); Pós-graduação em Educação para a Ciência - FC; A teoria da evolução biológica tornou-se o eixo organizador do pensamento biológico, e desde a publicação de A Origem das Espécies o tema tem sido amplamente discutido tanto dentro como fora dos ambientes acadêmicos. A partir do século XX, o ensino da teoria da Evolução Biológica de Charles Darwin passou a integrar os currículos da educação básica no Brasil e no mundo, e desde então muitas divergências acerca do ensino deste tema têm surgido. O uso de recursos didáticos alternativos e a educação informal em ciências podem ser uma importante ferramenta de auxílio ao professor, se bem utilizado em sala de aula, minimizando os problemas decorrentes do ensino tradicional. Os objetivos do trabalho foram os seguintes: (1) Identificar por quais meios os alunos do ensino médio de escolas públicas e particulares de São José do Rio Preto-SP aprendem ou se informam a respeito da teoria da Evolução Biológica; (2) avaliar a importância atribuída por professores à educação informal na aprendizagem da Evolução Biológica; (3) identificar se os professores de Biologia utilizam recursos e estratégias alternativas de ensino como recurso didático para ensinar a Evolução Biológica e qual a importância por eles atribuída a esses recursos; (4) verificar como os professores de Biologia se posicionam como parceiros mais capazes no ensino de Evolução Biológica. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida em duas fases: (1) Levantamento de dados sobre fontes de informação a respeito de Evolução Biológica entre alunos do ensino médio; (2) Entrevistas com professores de Biologia do ensino médio de modo a identificar como lidam com o uso de recursos alternativos e a educação informal...

Evolutionary Biology integrates several disciplines of Biology in a complex and interactive manner, where a deep understanding of the subject demands knowledge in diverse areas. Since this knowledge is often inaccessible to the majority of specialized professionals, including the teachers, we present some reflections in order to stimulate discussions aimed at the improvement of the conditions of education in this area. We examine the profile of evolutionary teaching in Brazil, based on questionnaires distributed to teachers in Secondary Education in the Federal District, on data provided by the "National Institute for Educational Studies and Research", and on information collected from teachers working in various regions of this country. Issues related to biological misconceptions, curriculum and didactic material are discussed, and some proposals are presented with the objective of aiding discussions aimed at the improvement of the teaching of evolutionary biology.

New applications of evolutionary biology in medicine are being discovered at an accelerating rate, but few physicians have sufficient educational background to use them fully. This article summarizes suggestions from several groups that have considered how evolutionary biology can be useful in medicine, what physicians should learn about it, and when and how they should learn it. Our general conclusion is that evolutionary biology is a crucial basic science for medicine. In addition to looking at established evolutionary methods and topics, such as population genetics and pathogen evolution, we highlight questions about why natural selection leaves bodies vulnerable to disease. Knowledge about evolution provides physicians with an integrative framework that links otherwise disparate bits of knowledge. It replaces the prevalent view of bodies as machines with a biological view of bodies shaped by evolutionary processes. Like other basic sciences, evolutionary biology needs to be taught both before and during medical school. Most introductory biology courses are insufficient to establish competency in evolutionary biology. Premedical students need evolution courses, possibly ones that emphasize medically relevant aspects. In medical school...

Tremendous advances in genetic and genomic techniques have resulted in the capacity to identify genes involved in adaptive evolution across numerous biological systems. One of the next major steps in evolutionary biology will be to determine how landscape-level geographical and environmental features are involved in the distribution of this functional adaptive genetic variation. Here, I outline how an emerging synthesis of multiple disciplines has and will continue to facilitate a deeper understanding of the ways in which heterogeneity of the natural landscapes mould the genomes of organisms.

New theoretical and conceptual frameworks are required for evolutionary biology to capitalize on the wealth of data now becoming available from the study of genomes, phenotypes, and organisms - including humans - in their natural environments.; Molecular and Cellular Biology; Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

There are few other structures in nature from which evolution has generated such wide diversity as the flower or inflorescence, and this diversity is commonly attributed to the influence of their animal visitors. By outsourcing their mate choice to pollinators, plants have left themselves - and especially their flowers - subject to the selective forces imposed by the behaviour, cognition and perception of the pollinators that serve them. The orchids provide some of the most remarkable and extreme examples of adaptations to specific animal pollinators. Perhaps one of the most peculiar of these strategies is sexual deception, whereby male insects are lured to the flower by mimicry of the female sex pheromone. This seemingly unlikely strategy has evolved multiple times independently on different continents in different parts of the orchid phylogeny which raises the question of what adaptive advantages might underlie such a strategy. This multidisciplinary thesis studies gene flow and pollinator behaviour in two sympatric sexually deceptive orchids in the genus Chiloglottis. The two species attract their specific wasp pollinators through emission of distinct species - specific semiochemicals. Since floral volatiles play a pre-eminent role in pollinator attraction...

Publication of this article was funded in part by the University of Florida Open-Access publishing Fund. In addition, requestors receiving funding through the UFOAP project are expected to submit a post-review, final draft of the article to UF's institutional repository, IR@UF, (www.uflib.ufl.edu/UFir) at the time of funding. The institutional Repository at the University of Florida community, with research, news, outreach, and educational materials. ; Qi et al. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2013, 13:143 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/13/143; Pages 1-13; doi:10.1186/1471-2148-13-143 Cite this article as: Qi et al.: Phylogeny and evolutionary history of glycogen synthase kinase 3/SHAGGY-like kinase genes in land plants. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2013 13:143.

Problem: In the study of conflicts, both economists and evolutionary biologists use the concepts ‘tragedy of the commons’ and ‘public goods dilemma’. What is the relationship between the economist and evolutionist views of these concepts? Model features: The economics literature defines the tragedy of the commons and the public goods dilemma in terms of rivalry and excludability of the good. In contrast, evolutionists define these conflicts based on fitness functions with two components: individual and group components of fitness. Mathematical method: Evolutionary game theory and the calculation of evolutionarily stable strategy trait values by standard optimization techniques and by replacing slopes of group phenotype on individual genotype by coefficients of relatedness. Conclusion: There is a direct relationship between rivalry and the individual component of fitness and between excludability and the group component of fitness. Moreover, although the prisoner’s dilemma constitutes a suitable metaphor to analyse both the public goods dilemma and the tragedy of the commons, it gives the false idea that the two conflicts are symmetric since they refer to situations in which individuals consume a common resource – tragedy of the commons – or contribute to a collective action or common good – public goods dilemma. However...

This dissertation uses the public career of Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould to examine the place of evolution in American culture from 1960 to 2002. Gould was a professional paleontologist and public science writer who rose to fame through his participation in a series of American controversies over biology and society. Prior to the 1980s, Gould publicly disagreed with other biologists over the relationship between liberalism and scientific research. As a New Left activist, Gould advocated caution over public pronouncements on evolutionary explanations of race and sex. His opponents believed that science could provide objective standards for understanding human difference. This thesis shows how the resurgence of creationism in the context of the New Right brought a new community into dialogue with these generally left-oriented academics. Evolutionary scientists and writers solidified a new evolutionary orthodoxy in their attempt to close ranks against the political, social and intellectual threat of creationism. Gould's intellectual and political struggles with the rise of this Darwinian orthodoxy demonstrate the impact that the American public had on the terms of debate within professional evolutionary biology. By studying the impact of public religious controversy on scientific knowledge production...

Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a population adapts to a local environment, information about this environment is fixed in a representative genome. However, when an environment changes, information can be lost. At the same time, information is processed by animal brains to survive in complex environments, and the capacity for information processing also evolves. Here I review applications of information theory to the evolution of proteins as well as to the evolution of information processing in simulated agents that adapt to perform a complex task.; Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures. To appear in "The Year in Evolutionary Biology", of the Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences

Evolutionary biology shares many concepts with statistical physics: both deal with populations, whether of molecules or organisms, and both seek to simplify evolution in very many dimensions. Often, methodologies have undergone parallel and independent development, as with stochastic methods in population genetics. We discuss aspects of population genetics that have embraced methods from physics: amongst others, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, travelling waves, and Monte-Carlo methods have been used to study polygenic evolution, rates of adaptation, and range expansions. These applications indicate that evolutionary biology can further benefit from interactions with other areas of statistical physics, for example, by following the distribution of paths taken by a population through time.; Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, glossary. Accepted in Trend in Ecology and Evolution (to appear in print in August 2011)

The phylogenetic comparative approach is a statistical method for analyzing correlations between traits across species. Whilst it has revolutionized evolutionary biology, can it work for conservation biology? Although it is correlative, advocates of the comparative method hope that it will reveal general mechanisms in conservation, provide shortcuts for prioritizing conservation research, and enable us to predict which species will experience (or create) problems in the future. Here, we ask whether these stated management goals are being achieved. We conclude that comparative methods are stimulating research into the ecological mechanisms underlying conservation, and are providing information for preemptive screening of problem species. But comparative analyses of extinction risk to date have tended to be too broad in scope to provide shortcuts to conserving particular endangered species. Correlates of vulnerability to conservation problems are often taxon, region and threat specific, so models must be narrowly focused to be of maximum practical use.

There are large variations of size among humans but in all populations, men are larger on average than women. For most biologists this fact can be easily explained by the same processes that explain the size dimorphism in large mammals in general and in apes in particular. Due to fights between males for the possession of females, sexual selection has favoured bigger males. Indeed, this factor certainly explains why males are selected for being large but lets aside the question of selection on the female side. Actually, it has been shown that larger females are also favoured by natural selection. This is particularly relevant for women because their probability of dying when giving birth is then reduced. In this paper, the common view that size dimorphism in humans results from the fact that the advantage of being big is stronger for men than for women is challenged by another hypothesis, namely that the difference results from a difference of cost rather than from a difference of benefits. The cost of being big would be higher in women simply because, under gender hierarchical regimes found in all cultures, men are allocated the best food. The interaction between evolutionary forces and cultural practices could then lead to this disadaptive situation.

Here we describe the motivation and workings of Dryad, a digital repository for data underlying published articles in the biosciences, that grew out of a grassroots effort to support a joint data archiving policy adopted by a consortium of journals in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Online resources to aid large-scale ecological and evolutionary biology are beginning to take root, only a decade behind fields such as genomics and molecular biology. One barrier has been a long tradition, in evolutionary biology at least, of work by individuals on the order of a few hundred of species rather than the thousands or hundreds of thousands necessary to understand the general evolutionary or ecological processes that explain species characteristics and distributions. Advances in collaborative and semantic software offer promise – it should be possible to develop high quality online species-level datasets for comparative analyses and even to integrate, via machine reasoning, across highly customized datasets. In this talk we will compare and contrast two approaches to assembling the data.

The Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD, "http://gmod.org":http://gmod.org) project provides interoperable, open source software tools for managing, visualizing and annotating biological data. GMOD is also a community of people addressing common challenges with biological data. Some well known software in GMOD includes GBrowse and JBrowse for genome browsing, Apollo for genome annotation, Chado for managing data, CMap for comparative map viewing, Galaxy for workflow creation and persistence, and BioMart for warehousing biological data. This talk will focus on three areas of particular interest to iEvoBio participants. 1) GBrowse_syn comparative genomics viewer 2) Natural Diversity Module of the Chado database schema 3) GMOD evolutionary biology hackathon The GBrowse_syn comparative genomics viewer displays synteny between a reference and any number of related species. It shows inversions, duplications, and indels, and can show synteny across non-contiguous regions. It is built on the widely used GBrowse genome viewer. The Natural Diversity Module is an extension to GMOD’s Chado database schema to enable Chado to support natural diversity, population genomics...

The history of systematics and evolutionary biology demonstrates how greatly the "modern evolutionary synthesis" instrumentally prevented, rather than facilitated, the intellectual growth and maturity of the diversity of evolutionary disciplines. In truth, the claim of the synthesis being synthetic is essentially without basis, indeed a myth. Instead, the "synthesis" had precisely the opposite effect: namely, squelching the arena of debate, disagreement, and diverse theorizing that had characterized the preceding decades. Although each of the 3 primary architects of the synthesis - Dobzhansky, Mayr, and Simpson - had his own agenda, they were united around the theme of population genetics and population thinking. When applied to systematics, especially by Mayr, the result can now be seen as confused at best. Perhaps this review will provoke a revival of earlier years of intellectual curiosity and fervor, and rekindle interest in systematic method and theory.

Charges leveled against Evolutionary Theory by Natural Selection (ETNS) of not being falsifiable are not adequately answered, not to mention dispelled, by exhibiting any amount of empirical evidence. Immunity to falsification means that ETNS can assimilate any possible data as a favorable case, and therefore empirical evidence cannot affect ETNS’s truth value. As a consequence, any attempt to provide an answer to such charges can only dwell at a philosophical level of analysis, whereas assessing the quality and quantity of the evidence supporting ETNS (whether such evidence comes from systematics, ecology, ethology, physiology or molecular genetics) belongs in the scientific level. Since ETNS is a central element for the intelligibility of biological science, it is of fundamental importance to pay attention to the philosophical arguments that counsel to mitigate the role of falsifiability as a criterion for good science. The relevant criteria should take into account both that factual theories need empirical content and that historical disciplines should be part of science. The consequences of those arguments for research practice in evolutionary ecology were previously assessed (Marone et al., 2002). Sadly, our attempt was misunderstood by Néspolo (2003)...