Feature Channels: Evolution and Darwin

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ll tadpoles grow into frogs, but not all frogs start out as tadpoles, reveals a new study on 720 species of frogs to be published in the journal Evolution. The study, “Phylogenetic analyses reveal unexpected patterns in the evolution of reproductive modes in frogs,” led by John J. Wiens, an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, and colleagues Ivan Gomez-Mestra from the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, and R. Alexander Pyron from George Washington University, uncovers the surprising evolution of life cycles in frogs.

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Tiny, humble rhabdopleurids have lived on the ocean floor for some 500 million years, outlasting more elaborate descendants, according to a new study in the journal Lethaia.

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Double flowers – though beautiful – are mutants. University of Washington biologists have found the class of genes responsible in a plant lineage more ancient than the one previously studied, offering a glimpse even further back into the evolutionary development of flowers.

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The origin of Cerataspis monstrosa has been a mystery as deep as the ocean waters it hails from for more than 180 years. For nearly two centuries, researchers have tried to track down the larva that has shown up in the guts of other fish over time but found no adult counterpart. Until now.

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In research published in September’s American Journal of Human Genetics, Georgia Tech's Soojin Yi looked at brain samples of each species. She found that differences in certain DNA modifications, called methylation, may contribute to phenotypic changes. The results also hint that DNA methylation plays an important role for some disease-related phenotypes in humans, including cancer and autism.

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Researchers pinpoint uniquely human patterns of gene activity in the brain that shed light on how we evolved differently than our closest relative. Identifying these genes could deepen understanding of human brain diseases.

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Poxviruses, which are responsible for smallpox and other diseases, can adapt to defeat different host antiviral defenses by quickly and temporarily producing multiple copies of a gene that helps the viruses to counter host immunity.

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What mechanisms control the generation and maintenance of biological diversity on the planet? It’s a central question in evolutionary biology. For land-dwelling organisms such as insects and the flowers they pollinate, it’s clear that interactions between species are one of the main drivers of the evolutionary change that leads to biological diversity.

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Researchers capture evolutionary dynamics in a new theoretical framework that could help explain some of the mysteries of how and why species change over time.

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Georgia Tech researchers are focusing on ways to fight cancer by attacking defective genes before they are able to make proteins. Professor John McDonald is studying micro RNAs (miRNAs), a class of small RNAs that interact with messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that have been linked to a number of diseases, including cancer. McDonald’s lab placed two different miRNAs (MiR-7 and MiR-128) into ovarian cancer cells and watched how they affected the gene system.

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Predatory beetles can detect the unique alarm signal released by ants that are under attack by parasitic flies, and the beetles use those overheard conversations to guide their search for safe egg-laying sites on coffee bushes.

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For years, scientists have questioned whether evolution is predictable, or whether chance events make such predictability unlikely. A new study finds that, in the case of some insects, the same adaptations have occurred independently, in separate species in different places and times.

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Using a process called paleo-experimental evolution, Georgia Tech researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli(E. coli) bacteria. This bacterium has now been growing for more than 1,000 generations, giving the scientists a front row seat to observe evolution in action.

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A new Web resource developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego is helping thousands of researchers worldwide unravel the enigmas of phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships among virtually every species on the planet.

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Joshua Rest, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, has co-authored an article appearing in BMC Genomics, “Horizontal transfer of expressed genes in a parasitic flowering plant,” detailing the first evidence of substantial horizontal gene transfer from a host to the parasitic flowering plant Rafflesia cantleyi. Professor Rest was co-leader of the project along with Professor Charles Davis from Harvard University.

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You are what you eat, and that seems to have been true even 2 million years ago, when a group of pre-human relatives was swinging through the trees and racing across the savannas of South Africa.

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Australopithecus sediba, believed to be an early relative of modern-day humans, enjoyed a diet of leaves, fruits, nuts, and bark, which meant they probably lived in a more wooded environment than is generally thought, a surprising find published in the current issue of Nature magazine.

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A 2 million-year-old mishap that befell two early members of the human family tree has provided the most robust evidence to date of what at least one pair of hominins ate.

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According to researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center, cancer is subject to the evolutionary processes laid out by Charles Darwin in his concept of natural selection. Natural selection was the process identified by Darwin by which nature selects certain physical attributes, or phenotypes, to pass on to offspring to better “fit” the organism to the environment.

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The common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates on Earth resembled a shark, according to a new analysis of the braincase of a 290-million-year-old fossil fish that has long puzzled paleontologists.

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Way more than fun and games, sexual reproduction appears to give an evolutionary advantage, a Michigan Tech biologist has discovered.

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A University of Tennessee study reveals how females chose their mates played a critical role in human evolution by leading to monogamous relationships, which laid the foundation for the institution of the modern family.

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Having recently looked at more than a thousand of the least-changed regions in the genomes of turtles and their closest relatives, a team of Boston University researchers has confirmed that turtles are most closely related to crocodilians and birds rather than to lizards, snakes, and tuataras.

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Though they evolved separately over millions of years in different worlds of darkness, bats and toothed whales use surprisingly similar acoustic behavior to locate, track, and capture prey using echolocation, the biological equivalent of sonar. Now a team of Danish researchers has shown that the acoustic behavior of these two types of animals while hunting is eerily similar.

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One of the world’s most important fossils has a story to tell about the brain evolution of modern humans and their ancestors, according to Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.

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Aerobic exercise triggers a reward system in the body of mammals built for endurance – like humans – but not other creatures, a new study from the University of Arizona and Eckerd College says.

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Conservationists with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have found that larger male gorillas living in the rainforests of Congo seem to be more successful than smaller ones at attracting mates and even raising young.

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In a study in PLoS Computational Biology, two Santa Fe Institute researchers trace the development of life-sustaining chemistry to the earliest forms of life on Earth.

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Worrying may have evolved along with intelligence as a beneficial trait, according to a recent study by scientists at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and other institutions.

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A new hypothesis posed by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, associate professor and colleagues could be a game changer in the evolution arena. The hypothesis suggests some species are surviving by discarding genes and depending on other species to play their hand.

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One of the outstanding questions of the early Earth is how ancient organisms made the transition from anoxygenic (no oxygen produced) to oxygenic photosynthesis. A team of scientists from Arizona State University has moved closer to solving this conundrum.

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It seems that “Lucy” was not the only hominin on the block in northern Africa about 3 million years ago.

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Paul M. Gignac, Ph.D., Instructor of Research, Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and colleagues at Florida State University and in California and Australia, found in a study of all 23 living crocodilian species that crocodiles can kill with the strongest bite force measured for any living animal. The study also revealed that the bite forces of the largest extinct crocodilians exceeded 23,000 pounds, a force two-times greater than the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex.

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New research reported here today at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) provides further support for the idea that comets bombarding Earth billions of years ago carried and deposited the key ingredients for life to spring up on the planet.

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Western Europe has long been held to be the "cradle" of Neandertal evolution since many of the earliest discoveries were from sites in this region. But when Neandertals started disappearing around 30,000 years ago, anthropologists figured that climactic factors or competition from modern humans were the likely causes. Intriguingly, new research suggests that Western European Neandertals were on the verge of extinction long before modern humans showed up. This new perspective comes from a study of ancient DNA carried out by an international research team. Rolf Quam, a Binghamton University anthropologist, was a co-author of the study led by Anders Götherström at Uppsala University and Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

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The George Washington University’s Brian Richmond and team of researchers say chimps use two legs to reach and carry scarce resources.

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Scientists from the Monell Center report frequent loss of sweet taste in mammalian species that are exclusive meat eaters. Further, two sea-dwelling mammals that swallow their food whole have extensive taste loss. The findings demonstrate that feeding preferences of mammalian species are significantly shaped by their taste receptor biology.

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Come to Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to hear about a research adventure to the Caribbean islands and explore the mysteries of lizard evolution.

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Earlier this month, Charles Darwin received an intriguing gift for his 203rd birthday--an online magazine that reports everything from biology to politics and the arts from an evolutionary perspective.

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- As scientists continue developing climate change projection models, paleontologists studying an extreme short-term global warming event have discovered direct evidence about how mammals respond to rising temperatures.

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For venomous creatures, the "business end," or active part, of a toxin is the area on the surface of a protein that is most likely to undergo rapid evolution in response to environmental constraints, say researchers at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society.

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A University of Arkansas biologist has created a sketch of what the first common ancestor of plants and algae may have looked like. The image appears as part of a “Perspective” article in the Feb. 17 issue of Science. The image is based on a research paper that is also published in this issue of Science.

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Fossil record of graptoloids challenges the theory that immediately after a mass extinction, species develop new physical traits at a rapid pace.

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Advances in studying genes mean that scientists in evolutionary developmental biology or “evo-devo” can now explain more clearly than ever before how bats got wings, the turtle got its shell and blind cave fish lost their eyes, says evolutionary biologist Craig Albertson, who studies cichlid fishes.

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An evolutionary geneticist helped discover the gene in passion vine butterflies that keeps predators from eating them. The gene is responsible for red patterns on the butterflies' wings.

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"Forked fungus beetles are not pretty – they look like tree bark – but they're helping us better understand the evolution of social behavior," said University of Virginia evolutionary biologist Vince Formica, lead author on a paper published in the January edition of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

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A new study of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania suggests social networks sparked the evolution of cooperation.

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Blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) have not only lost their sight, but have adapted to perpetual darkness by also losing their pigment (albinism) and having altered sleep patterns. Research led by New York University biologists shows that the cavefish are an example of convergent evolution, with several populations repeatedly, and independently, losing their sight and pigmentation.

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For students to accept the theory of evolution, an intuitive “gut feeling” may be just as important as understanding the facts, according to a new study.

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A North Carolina State University discovery of the unique chemical composition of a cockroach signal – a “Let’s hook up” sex pheromone emitted by certain female wood cockroaches to entice potential mates – could have far-ranging benefits, including improved conservation of an endangered woodpecker.