In day two, Evolution 2010 is already feeling a mite overwhelming. I started the morning in the SSE symposium on speciation and the origin of dimorphism, then spent the rest of the day bouncing from talk to talk and preparing for my own presentation, which is tomorrow at 9:30. I’m going to bed early tonight, I think.
There’s a new daily wrap-up podcast over at Evolution, Development, and Genomics, and, if you haven’t been following the conference on Twitter, check hashtag #evol2010 or this list of twittering attendees I’ve compiled.
What’s going on with snakes, anyway? Photo by Tambako the Jaguar.- In the SSE symposium, Jenny Boughman and Dan Bolnick discussed ways in which the evolution of sexual dimorphism was like the evolution of different ecological specialists [PDF]—and how males and females evolving different ecological roles can counteract divergent selection acting on the population as a whole.
- In the same symposium, Marguerite Butler showed that correlated neutral evolution of male and female traits may have shaped the diversification of Anolis lizards, using OUCH, a statistical package for R [PDF] that Marguerite demonstrated at the seminar I just attended.
- Luke Harmon presented an impressive but not very conclusive exploration of morphological evolution in squamate reptiles. One insight: once a reptile loses its limbs, its head is free to evolve in new ways, but not always the same ways. Why? Good question.
Primary literature referenced
Bolnick, D. I. & Doebeli, M. (2003). Sexual dimorphism and adaptive speciation: Two sides of the same ecological coin. Evolution 57(11):2433-49 DOI: 10.1111/j.0014-3820.2003.tb01489.x.
Butler, M., & King, A. (2004). Phylogenetic comparative analysis: a modeling approach for adaptive evolution. The American Naturalist, 164 (6), 683-95 DOI: 10.1086/426002