Volume 3 Issue 3, March 2019

Sociocultural transitions and medical advancements can disrupt evolutionary equilibriums underlying modern human anatomy, physiology and life history. Disentangling such complex biosocial evolutionary dynamics poses serious ethical questions but has strong potential for guiding public health policies.

Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual’s level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life. Here, we discuss the main factors associated with acceptance of evolution and chart a path forward for evolution education research.

Since its inception, the East African Association for Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology has brought together scholars and researchers who conduct research in palaeoanthropology, archaeology and palaeontology, creating a balanced forum for the study of human heritage in Africa.

A survey of 16S rRNA sequences of the skin microbiomes of amphibians across the globe reveals links between climate and species richness as well as potential bacterial gene functions. The work paves the way for mechanistic studies of how the environment affects microbial community assembly.

A modelling study suggests that the ecology of host co-colonisation may play a key role in shaping population-level frequencies of antibiotic resistance in commensal bacteria.

A game theory study supported by in vitro experimental data shows that drug treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer cells causes the cells to switch between evolutionary games they play among each other. Moreover, the work calls into question standard assumptions on the fitness costs of drug resistance to cancer cells.

Conceptualising the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA) is essential for unravelling early evolution, yet there is disagreement over what form LECA took. Here the authors examine four potential forms of LECA: an abstract phylogenetic state, a single cell, a population, and a consortium of organisms.

Climate change is spatially asymmetrical and so will alter the behaviour of generalist consumer species, affecting food webs in two ways. Movement into novel ecosystems will affect the topology of food webs, while changes within an ecosystem will affect interaction strengths.

Evolutionary change in trait variation has the potential to affect the ecosystem tipping points that are of concern in a world undergoing anthropogenic change.

Analysing plant–pollinator interactions across all major land use classes in four cities, the authors show that residential gardens and community gardens are urban pollinator hotspots, with pollinator abundance positively associated with household income.

Male túngara frogs living in urban environments have adjusted their mating calls in response to differing sexual and natural selection pressures. Males have more conspicuous calls, experience lower predation risk and attract more females than forest-dwelling conspecifics.

Data on the richness and composition of the skin microbiome from 2,349 individual amphibians, representing 205 species across a broad geographic range, is compared with local biotic and abiotic environmental factors.

Integrating global data on tree species richness uncovers regional and environmental grain-dependent effects on species richness and allows predictions at the global scale

A NutNet global grassland study finds that leaf N, P and K consistently respond to soil nutrient additions, but leaf morphological traits, such as specific leaf area, are inconsistent indicators of anthropogenic perturbations.

Leaf respiration may be inhibited by light, but how this affects ecosystem-level processes is unclear. Analysing globally distributed eddy-covariance observations, Keenan et al. show that this inhibition is widespread and follows consistent seasonal patterns within ecosystem types.

More than 200,000 observations of copepods in the North Atlantic between 1960 and 2014 identify northwestward shifts in carbon flux, driven by altered copepod distributions and community structure.

Analysing occurrence records from >200,000 plant species across 1,103 regions, the authors show that mycorrhizal associations are less common among native island plants than native mainland plants and decline with increasing island isolation.

An expert elicitation survey estimates yield losses for the five major food crops worldwide, suggesting that the highest losses are associated with food-deficit regions with fast-growing populations and frequently with emerging or re-emerging pests and diseases.

Fitting a model of within-host competition and bacterial transmission to empirical patterns of antibiotic resistance, the authors show that frequency-dependent selection promotes coexistence between resistant and non-resistant strains at the population level.

Growth-rate data from co-cultures of drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cancer cells are quantitatively described using evolutionary game theory, revealing that drug treatment alters the type of game played by the cancer cells from ‘Leader’ to ‘Deadlock’.

This study shows how polyploidy impacts population genomics and the evolutionary potential of polyploids in natural populations of the diploid-autotetraploid Arabidopsis arenosa.

The genome of the Antarctic blackfin icefish shows expansion of genes involved in protection from damage caused by ice and high-oxygen concentrations, which reflects adaptation to extreme Antarctic environments.

A phylogenetic analysis reveals the evolutionary history of 5mC methyltransferases in fungi and finds that fungi lack the canonical gene-body methylation seen in other taxa.

Experimental evolution in yeast using URA3 reporter assay shows that chromatin-based, epigenetically heritable gene silencing can drive adaptive evolution.