About the Project
Evolutionary biology commonly makes short-term predictions concerning how populations will respond to selection arising from local environmental change. It also predicts longer-term macro-evolutionary trends in response to selection, such as the evolution of larger body size in animals (Cope’s rule). However, traditional approaches rarely outline alternative and realistic scenarios for understanding longer-term trends in which a sequence of characters evolve in response to each other, as well as evolutionary responses across ecological communities, or how populations will evolve in the non-immediate future, in part because future selection is deemed hard to predict.
The extended evolutionary synthesis (Laland et al., 2015) opens up the possibility of more informed forecasting, by drawing on insights from developmental and behavioural biology to make probabilistic predictions concerning how organisms will modify environments, and hence what feedback, in the form of modified selection pressures, they will encounter in the future. Here we will draw on knowledge of patterns of niche construction in animal builders to try to understand long-term and parallel evolutionary responses to self-constructed aspects of their environment using comparative phylogenetic and meta-analytical methods. For instance, by building a nest an organism creates selection pressures for the nest to be defended, maintained, regulated, and improved upon in design, as well as for others to steal it, destroy it, squat in it, or dump eggs in it. Such adaptive responses evolve time and time again, generating signatures of environmental change that are quite distinct from processes independent of the organism, to produce parallel evolution in independent lineages, and often long-term trends, in ways that are potentially probabilistically predictable.
Drawing on insights from niche construction theory (Odling-Smee et al. 2003), we will make a series of predictions for (i) trends and (ii) parallel patterns, in evolutionary responses to the construction of animal artefacts.
We also predict (iii) elevated rates of response to selection arising from self-constructed compared to autonomous aspects of the environments. Initially the project will focus on web-building in spiders, and nest building in fishes and birds, but we expect to diversify to include other forms of niche construction, and other taxa. The student will work with a small team of researchers who are currently compiling datasets suitable for comparative analyses. Comparative phylogenetic statistical analyses will be conducted on the collated databases to test our predictions. While the specific hypotheses tested will in part reflect the particular interests of the student, one possible focus concerns exploring the role of nest building in the evolution of (eu)sociality. Meta-analyses will evaluate the prediction of elevated rates of response to selection arising from self-constructed compared to autonomous aspects of the environments. A mathematical modelling component is possible, but not obligate.
The predictions are based on the expectation that niche construction will generate unusually consistent and sustained responses to selection, across independent taxa, leading to consistent longer-term evolutionary trends encompassing multiple diverse characters. We will specify this as sequence information related to traits, i.e. patterns will be detectable whereby character B will tend to evolve following the evolution of character A (i.e., A->B). By combining predictions concerning pairs of discrete traits (A->B, B->C), and considering traits with multiple levels (i.e. A->A’->A’’), we will predict more extended sequences (e.g. spider web building -> refined web structure -> subsociality -> reduced aggression). We will also test predictions of parallel patterns in independent taxa, such as resistance to fungal diseases in both burrowing spiders and burrowing mammals.
Dr Sally Street (Hull University) provides expertise in comparative phylogenetic methods, and will provide training in these methods. We will begin by using established methodologies (e.g. continuous-time Markov models of trait evolution on existing phylogenies in the BayesTraits framework) but expect through collaboration to be able to deploy more powerful bespoke models designed specifically for exploring trait sequence evolution. The project is one of 22 linked research projects by an international team of world-leading researchers collectively designed to put the extended evolutionary synthesis to the test.
References
Laland KN, Uller T, Feldman MW, Sterelny K, Müller GB, et al. 2015 The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions. Proc R Soc B 282. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1019
Odling-Smee FJ, Laland KN & Feldman MW. 2003. Niche construction: the neglected process in evolution. Princeton University Press.