Some of you may already have seen this (for example, PZ has mentioned it), but Nature has put together a short PDF document that gives fifteen lines of "evidence for evolution by natural selection" [here]. Here's the list (stolen from PZ):
- The discovery of Indohyus, an ancestor to whales.
- The discovery of Tiktaalik, an ancestor to tetrapods.
- The origin of feathers revealed in creatures like Epidexipteryx.
- The evolution of patterning mechanisms in teeth.
- he developmental and evolutionary origin of the vertebrate skeleton.
- Speciation driven indirectly by selection in sticklebacks.
- Selection for longer-legged lizards in Caribbean island populations.
- A co-evolutionary arms race between Daphnia and its parasites.
- Non-random dispersal and gene flow in populations of great tits.
- Maintenance of polymorphisms in populations of guppies.
- Contingency in the evolution of pharyngeal jaws in the moray.
- Developmental genes that regulate the shape of beaks in Darwin's finches.
- Evolution of regulatory genes that specify wing spots in Drosophila.
- Evolution of toxin resistance.
- The concept of evolutionary capacitance: the idea that environmental stress can expose hidden variations that are then subject to selection.
Take a look at the original document (and PZ's linked postings above). You can also actually download the original articles via the PDF.
I'd like to point out, however, that some of the "gems" don't actually provide much evidence for natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. They do instead offer strong evidence for the fact of evolution and the pathway through which organisms have traveled over time.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
This week, Nature magazine published a short list of recent important developments in evolutionary biology that support the theory of evolution, as a tool to help explain that evolution is definitely a dynamic and useful theory in our field and to demonstrate that the evidence is still growing.…
Don't miss it! Tonight at 8pmET/7pm Central, NOVA is showing What Darwin Never Knew, a documentary about evo-devo. I shall be glued to my TV tonight!
I just started watching it. So far, it's a nice little history of Darwin and his ideas; Sean Carroll is a good person to have talking up the story.…
Evolution works on different scales. In a single day, HIV's genetic code changes as it adapts to our ever-adapting immune system. Over the course of decades, the virus can make a successful leap from one species to another (from chimpanzees to humans, for example). Over a few thousand years, humans…
...or how a learned to stop worrying and love evo-devo.
As my mind gets a chance to process some of the stuff I heard and talked about at the meeting I just returned from, I'll post some thoughts that will help me organize my ideas (hopefully better organized than that last sentence). This is the…
Fantastic! Remember I was asking you about an article just like this, not too long ago? Woo-hoo! I'm definitely going to use this in my classes.
Roberta
I'd forgotten ...
Glad it works though.
Well, thanks for posting it. Glad to see you blogging again.
Indohyus was not "an ancestor to whales" - for one thing it was roughly contemporary with archaeocetes such as Rodhocetus.