The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he's shown how new plant species emerge from hybrids. When two species of plants form a hybrid, it doesn't necessarily become a sterile dead end. In fact, hybridization is an important source of entirely new species. Rieseberg does his work mainly on sunflowers, and so whenever I walk past a charming row of them, I think of the weird inter-species mingling that may lurk in their past.
More like this
Yesterday I put up a post where I attempted to use a visual analogy for what I believe might be evolutionary forces operative over short periods of time that result in phenotypic diversification across populations
We have a guestblogger today! At my request, Peggy Schaeffer kindly sent me the following introduction to Dryad, which I reproduce as I received it (save for minor formatting details).
Not all beneficial alleles come with deleterious side effects, in case I gave that impression. Of course, not all beneficial alleles come from mutations either.
The most recent issue of the Journal of Heredity contains a bunch of articles from a symposium on the "Genetics of Speciation" organized by Loren Rieseberg.