{"id":38925,"date":"2011-03-21T23:34:29","date_gmt":"2011-03-22T07:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=10410"},"modified":"2011-03-21T23:34:29","modified_gmt":"2011-03-22T07:34:29","slug":"space-the-final-evolutionary-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/03\/21\/space-the-final-evolutionary-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"Space, the final evolutionary frontier"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a rather perplexing paper out in <em>PNAS<\/em> which I stumbled upon today, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/early\/2011\/03\/15\/1018989108.abstract\">An evolutionary process that assembles phenotypes through space rather than through time<\/a>. Perplexing because I wonder if it is almost so obvious as to be boring, in the trivial but true category, or if it points to a rather deep dimensions of evolutionary process which we&#8217;ve ignored. The authors themselves offer up that they&#8217;re attempting to reintroduce a concept which has long been in the literature, and, they admit that there isn&#8217;t much empirical data to test the importance of the dynamic which they&#8217;re outlining. For example, after discussing the consequences which might be entailed by the widespread significance of the phenomenon which they&#8217;re describe, they note, &#8220;We do not have enough data to test this proposition.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s their abstract:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In classical evolutionary theory, traits evolve because they facilitate organismal survival and\/or reproduction. We discuss a different type of evolutionary mechanism that relies upon differential dispersal. Traits that enhance rates of dispersal inevitably accumulate at expanding range edges, and assortative mating between fast-dispersing individuals at the invasion front results in an evolutionary increase in dispersal rates in successive generations. <strong>This cumulative process (which we dub \u201cspatial sorting\u201d) generates &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a rather perplexing paper out in PNAS which I stumbled upon today, An evolutionary process that assembles phenotypes through space rather than through time. Perplexing because I wonder if it is almost so obvious as to be boring, in the tr&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38925"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39020,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38925\/revisions\/39020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}