Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumEnvironmental change 'triggers rapid evolution'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22039872Researchers were surprised how quickly the mites evolved as a result of environmental changes
Changes to their surroundings can trigger "rapid evolution" in species as they adopt traits to help them survive in the new conditions, a study shows.
Studying soil mites in a laboratory, researchers found that the invertebrates' age of maturity almost doubled in just 20-or-so generations.
It had been assumed that evolutionary change only occurred over a much longer timescale.
The findings have been published in the journal Ecology Letters.
hunter
(38,264 posts)Evolving novel genes is the rarer "over millions of years case," but lightly tweaking the settings of an existing genetic toolkit can happen at a very rapid rate. Combining these minor adjustments with sexual recombination and natural selection makes some species are capable of rapid evolution when environments change.
Species like dogs, people, or these mites, apparently have deep genetic toolkits and can adapt to changing environments rapidly. In a sense the process of evolution itself is built into the genetic toolkit.
phantom power
(25,966 posts)Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems:
http://www.amazon.com/Robustness-Evolvability-Living-Systems-Complexity/dp/0691134049
The main take-away was that many mutations are essentially fitness-neutral, and a population of organisms can accumulate a lot of them over time. In times when the fitness landscape is more or less static, they represent a sort of latent pool of variation. When the fitness landscape changes, say climate change, or evolution in the other members of the local ecosystem, some of these latent neutral variations suddenly become non-neutral with respect to fitness and are now raw material for natural selection.
In other words, all species are likely to have a deeper "toolkit" than we used to think.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)> The main take-away was that many mutations are essentially fitness-neutral, and a population
> of organisms can accumulate a lot of them over time. In times when the fitness landscape is
> more or less static, they represent a sort of latent pool of variation. When the fitness landscape
> changes, say climate change, or evolution in the other members of the local ecosystem, some
> of these latent neutral variations suddenly become non-neutral with respect to fitness and are
> now raw material for natural selection.