Congratulations to Fabrice Eroukhmanoff for obtaining postdoctoral EU-fellowship ("Marie Curie")

Former PhD-student Fabrice Eroukhmanoff, who is currently postdoc at CEES in Oslo (Norway) has apparently obtained a postdoctoral scholarship from the European Union through the "Marie Curie"-programme. As he recently obtained a two-year postdoctoral scholarship from the Swedish Research Council (VR), this means that he can stay longer in Oslo and be able to do more research, before possibly returning to Sweden.

On behalf of myself, as proud former advisor, and the rest of us, I wish to congratulate Fabrice for yet another impressive achievement. Well done!

Visit by Peter and Rosemary grant and lab-meeting this week

This will be quite an exciting week at our department. On Thursday and Friday, we are visited by legendary evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant (Princeton University), who are famous for their long-term population and ecological studies of Galápagos Finches on Daphne Major. Rosemary will give a seminar on Thursday (October 6) at 13.15 (note! Not usual time at 14.00) in the "Blue Hall", entitled:  "Evolution of Darwin's Finches: the role of genetics, ecology and behaviour".

The next day, on October 7, Peter will introduce a reseach symposium in honour of the Grant couple with the theme "Microevolution in the wild". This symposium starts at 08.30, with Peter's talk which is entitled: "Microevolution in Darwin´s finches". Other contributions to this symposium comes from two members of our research lab: Anna Runemark and Maren Wellenreuther. The full programme can be found here.


Anna would like to have some feedback an input on her presentation, before the symposium, and we will therefore listen to her during our lab-meeting this week, which will take place on Thursday, October 6 at 10.00 in the seminar room "Fagus" (3rd floor, Ecology Building). Anna will bring fika. After her presentation, we will discuss a recent paper in PNAS, about the link between microevolution and macroevolution, by Uyeda, Hansen, Arnold and Pienaar entitled: "The million year wait for macroevolutionary bursts".

This is a very important paper that adresses the issue of (apparent) evolutionary stasis in phenotypic traits, and how to reconcile this with the observation that natural (and sexual) selection is generally considered to be strong in natural (contemporary) populations, and the fact that there appears to be abundant additive genetic variance for rapid evolutionary change. Yet, it seems to seldom happen, and this is what we are going to discuss. You will find the title and Abstract below. I would also like to recommend the interesting post by Chicago-professor and population geneticist Jerry Coyne who comments upon their findings at his blog "Why Evolution is True". The title of his post summarizes very well the main finding by Uyeda et al: "Want evolutionary change? Wait a million years".

The million-year wait for macroevolutionary bursts

1. Josef C. Uyeda^a,¹,
2. Thomas F. Hansen^b,
3. Stevan J. Arnold^a, and
4. Jason Pienaar^c

+ Author Affiliations

1. ^aDepartment of Zoology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331;
2. ^bDepartment of Biology, Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, University of Oslo, 0316 Oslo, Norway; and
3. ^cDepartment of Genetics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa 0002

Abstract

We lack a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary pattern and process because short-term and long-term data have rarely been combined into a single analytical framework. Here we test alternative models of phenotypic evolution using a dataset of unprecedented size and temporal span (over 8,000 data points). The data are body-size measurements taken from historical studies, the fossil record, and among-species comparative data representing mammals, squamates, and birds. By analyzing this large dataset, we identify stochastic models that can explain evolutionary patterns on both short and long timescales and reveal a remarkably consistent pattern in the timing of divergence across taxonomic groups. Even though rapid, short-term evolution often occurs in intervals shorter than 1 Myr, the changes are constrained and do not accumulate over time. Over longer intervals (1–360 Myr), this pattern of bounded evolution yields to a pattern of increasing divergence with time. The best-fitting model to explain this pattern is a model that combines rare but substantial bursts of phenotypic change with bounded fluctuations on shorter timescales. We suggest that these rare bursts reflect permanent changes in adaptive zones, whereas the short-term fluctuations represent local variations in niche optima due to restricted environmental variation within a stable adaptive zone.

 

Visit by Thomas F. Hansen and Arnaud Le Rouzic this week

This week our department will be visited by theoretical evolutionary biologist Thomas F. Hansen, who is currently professor at University of Oslo in Norway. I am pleased to host Thomas during his visit to Lund, as I visited his department Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) in May last year, and it is now my time to take care of him as he visits our department.

Thomas former postdoc Arnaud Le Rouzic will also visit us, and will give a short presentation of his research during our lab-meeting on Wednesday (10.15; Thomas will arrive later, in Wednesday afternoon). During our lab-meeting on Wednesday, I was thinking we should also discuss a paper about evolutionary quantative genetics, authored by Steve Chenoweth et al:

Author(s): Chenoweth SF (Chenoweth, Stephen F.)1, Rundle HD (Rundle, Howard D.)2,3, Blows MW (Blows, Mark W.)1

AMERICAN NATURALIST Volume: 175 Issue: 2 Pages: 186-196 Published: FEB 2010

Abstract: Although divergent natural selection is common in nature, the extent to which genetic constraints bias evolutionary trajectories in its presence remains largely unknown. Here we develop a general framework to integrate estimates of divergent selection and genetic constraints to estimate their contributions to phenotypic divergence among natural populations. We apply these methods to estimates of phenotypic selection and genetic covariance from sexually selected traits that have undergone adaptive divergence among nine natural populations of the fly Drosophila serrata. Despite ongoing sexual selection within populations, differences in its direction among them, and genetic variance for all traits in all populations, divergent sexual selection only weakly resembled the observed pattern of divergence. Accounting for the influence of genetic covariance among the traits significantly improved the alignment between observed and predicted divergence. Our results suggest that the direction in which sexual selection generates divergence may depend on the pattern of genetic constraint in individual populations, ultimately restricting how sexually selected traits may diversify. More generally, we show how evolution is likely to proceed in the direction of major axes of genetic variance, rather than the direction of selection itself, when genetic variance-covariance matrices are ill conditioned and genetic variance is low in the direction of selection.

The paper can be downloaded here. Most of you probably already know that Steve Chenoweth is the postdoc host of Tom Gosden, former PhD-student in our lab.

Also, you should of course not miss the exciting Thursday seminar (18 February at 14.00 in "Blue Hall") by Thomas, also on the theme of quantitative genetics, with the title:

Measuring evolvability and constraints with examples from the evolution of Dalechampia blossoms

We do thus have a very exciting week ahead of us!