Volume 1 Issue 3, March 2017

The founding members of the Cultural Evolution Society were surveyed to identify the major scientific questions and ‘grand challenges’ currently facing the study of cultural evolution. We present the results and discuss the implications for an emergent synthesis in the study of culture based on Darwinian principles.

Can applying an evolutionary perspective generate effective change in clinical care and/or public health policy? An evolution-informed research programme has changed practice on UK post-natal units and UK health policies on infant care over the past two decades.

Environmental laws are binding and enforceable tools that constrain human impacts on the environment, but how effective are they at keeping humanity away from critical planetary boundaries?

Global Forest Watch provides up-to-date and interactive information on forest cover for governments, the private sector, NGOs, journalists, universities and the general public. We talked to Director Crystal Davis about how it works, its achievements and its future plans.

Artificial selection for antibiotic resistance in microorganisms reveals why and how expected evolutionary trade-offs between population growth rate and population carrying capacity are not observed in resource-limited environments, with ‘trade-ups’ occurring instead.

New microfossils suggest that a rich meiofauna was already present in the early Cambrian, offering a solution to the problem that the Cambrian explosion appears to have sprung out of nothing.

Female genital cutting in five West African nations is frequency-dependent and is associated with higher reproductive success among ethnicities in which cutting predominates, a fitness advantage that may outweigh its costs to physical and psychological health.

New palaeoecological data from New Guinea reveal that climatic change at the Holocene boundary is unlikely to have driven early agriculture in the region. More nuanced understanding of how humans responded to past climate change could better inform our responses in the future.

An ‘underwater elevator’ takes research 10,000 m under the sea and reveals a pollution legacy in remote oceanic trenches.

We need to estimate protein tertiary structure, as well as using primary sequences, in order to further our understanding of protein evolution and evolutionary processes in general.

miRNAs are crucial regulators of normal development in plants and animals, but their origins remain obscure. Exploration of the similarities and differences between different miRNA pathways help to elucidate their origins and role.

Humans have been modifying environments and habitats both indirectly and directly for millennia. This has resulted in extensive changes to the biology of non-domesticated non-human species, and this pattern is likely to increase in the future

Recent developments in data acquisition and quantitative modelling allow evolutionary biologists to predict future processes. This Perspective reviews progress in understanding the evolutionary dynamics of systems such as microorganisms and cancer and discusses unifying concepts of predictive analysis.

It is unclear when multicellular animals first invaded the microscopic ecological niche between sediment grains given the absence of such animals from the fossil record. Microscopic Loriciferans are described from the Cambrian period, showing an early occupation of this important niche.

The evolution of antibiotic resistance is expected to incur a cost. Here, the lack of an apparent cost during doxycycline resistance evolution is reconciled with evolutionary trade-off theory.

Variation around colour pattern genes is highly modular in Heliconius butterflies. This modular architecture explains the diversity of colour patterns and provides a flexible mechanism for rapid morphological diversification.

Evolutionary explanations for ageing suggest late-onset deleterious mutations may be tolerated or even favoured by selection. Here, data from human genome-wide association studies are used to support these evolutionary predictions.

Dramatic change to environments and climates across the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary is often cited as driving human subsistence change, but at Kiowa, New Guinea, environments and human lifeways remained consistent, stable isotope analysis reveals.

Female genital cutting is detrimental to health and its elimination is a priority. It is also important to understand why it persists. Here, a frequency-dependent evolutionary fitness advantage of FGC is shown using data from West African countries.

Extreme wildfire events are on the increase, particularly in anthropogenic, suburban landscapes. Particular areas of concern are the subtropical Southern Hemisphere and European Mediterranean Basin.

The Australian pitcher plant (Cephalotus sp.) genome reveals genetic changes associated with prey attraction, capture, digestion and nutrient absorption. Comparison with other carnivorous plants reveals constraints on evolution of plant carnivory

Certain mutations are characteristic of specific lineages across the phylogeny of birds, reptiles and mammals. Here, protein structural information is used to separate out such mutations that are adaptive from those that compensate changes at other sites.

Amphipod fauna from the deepest ocean trenches are revealed to contain significant levels of persistent organic pollutants.

Evolutionary sexual conflict often occurs after copulation within the female body, allowing the female to respond flexibly to the male strategy. Here, theoretical results show that this female plasticity reduces levels of sexual conflict and prevents runaway selection.

Living in a harsh environment is linked to breeding in cooperative groups, but which is cause and which is effect? Here, a bird phylogeny is used to show that, contrary to previous assumption, cooperative breeders are more likely to colonize harsh environments.

Higher-order interactions (HOIs) are often assumed to be negligible in natural communities. Here, the authors present a framework for incorporating HOIs into diversity models and show that their inclusion can dramatically improve explanatory power.

Analysis of time-series abundance trends from more than a thousand local populations across Europe reveals a consistent impact of temperature on terrestrial communities, but variable impacts on freshwater and marine realms.

Segmental duplications in the genome are regions with the potential for the evolution of phenotypic novelties, but their cataloguing has been technically difficult. Here, the evolution and function of human duplications is characterized.