Resolving the paradox of evolutionary stasis
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Inst of Evolutionary Biology
Abstract
Tall people have been shown to earn more and appear more attractive to the opposite sex. This phenomenon is not restricted to humans, and is a general finding across may types of organism: large individuals tend to be better than smaller individuals. In addition large parents are consistently shown to produce large offspring. Taken together, these two findings suggest that most organisms should be evolving larger body sizes. However, the evidence for this is weak, and many species appear to stay the same size for thousands of generations. Currently, we do not have a good explanation of why species stay the same size for large periods of time. One possibility is that we have tended to ignore the impact that an individual's body size has on its family members. If being large is harmful to other family members then we may expect species to be smaller than what is good for the individual. For example, if parents have greedy offspring then they may only be able to produce few offspring over their lifetime, and individuals raised with greedy siblings may be more likely to die from starvation. Although we have a good idea that both these phenomenon exist, we do not know if they can explain why organisms are the size they are. In addition, we know almost nothing about the inheritance of parental care or sibling rivalry. This is important because these phenomena can change the normal inheritance patterns. For example, with normal inheritance individuals from families that are genetically programmed to grow fast will be larger than the average. However, sibling rivalry may be stronger when everyone is trying to grow fast and younger siblings may end up growing very slowly despite having genes that try and make them large. We can measure patterns of inheritance by looking if relatives resemble each other more than non-relatives. However, relatives may resemble each other because they share the same genes or because they have been raised in the same environment. To separate the effects of nature and nurture we can let parents raise some of their own offspring and some foster offspring. If genes are involved, then the parents own offspring should resemble each other. However, if the environment also plays a role then the parents own offspring may also resemble the fostered offspring. It is not ethical to create foster families in human populations, but we can create foster families in blue tits, as they do not appear to notice any difference. Although blue tits are very different from humans they do show some similarities: they are raised with their siblings by both parents, and there is a great deal of competition, with the youngest usually coming out the worst. Also, because they are very common and will use man made nest boxes it is possible to create many families that are a mixture of normal and fostered offspring. Only when we have compared many families is it possible to accurately measure the relative importance of genes and the environment. Also, when foster families are created in certain ways it also allows us to see if genes play a role in sibling rivalry, and after a few generations we can also look to see if genes also play a role in parental care. Once we understand how body-size, parental care and sibling rivalry are inherited, and once we understand whether being large is harmful to other family members, we will know whether family interactions keep species small.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
Jarrod Hadfield (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Hadfield J
(2012)
The Evolution of Parental Care
Hadfield J
(2010)
MCMC Methods for Multi-Response Generalized Linear Mixed Models: The MCMCglmm R Package
in Journal of Statistical Software
Hadfield JD
(2011)
Cryptic evolution: does environmental deterioration have a genetic basis?
in Genetics
Hadfield JD
(2013)
Disentangling genetic and prenatal sources of familial resemblance across ontogeny in a wild passerine.
in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution
Hadfield JD
(2010)
The misuse of BLUP in ecology and evolution.
in The American naturalist
Hadfield JD
(2010)
General quantitative genetic methods for comparative biology: phylogenies, taxonomies and multi-trait models for continuous and categorical characters.
in Journal of evolutionary biology
Hadfield JD
(2013)
Intraclutch differences in egg characteristics mitigate the consequences of age-related hierarchies in a wild passerine.
in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution
Longdon B
(2011)
Host phylogeny determines viral persistence and replication in novel hosts.
in PLoS pathogens
Phillimore AB
(2010)
Differences in spawning date between populations of common frog reveal local adaptation.
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Thomson C
(2017)
Prenatal maternal effects appear to be insensitive to experimental or natural environmental variation
in Functional Ecology
Description | The grant had four aims; 1/ To experimentally increase parental care in order to look at the fitness costs. We have conducted a 2-year experiment where we used playback of chick begging calls to parents in order to increase the amount of parental care they provide. Unfortunately, it seems like the playback did not elicit a response in the parents, despite previous small-scale experiments suggesting that it should have been successful. Over the next two years we will try a different experimental approach in order to experimentally test for selection on parental care. 2/ To decompose phenotypic skew into its genetic and environmental components. The relevant data have been collected, new skew-mixed models for data analysis have been developed and tested, and the study has been pre-registered. We anticipate that this work will be completed within the ext few months. 3/ To estimate the amount of variation in chick mass that can attributed to genes expressed in parents. Due to sample size constraints we envisaged doing this in the final year of the grant. This breeding season looks like it will involve high recruitment, such that a sufficiently powerful analysis can be performed following this seasons genotyping. 4/ To process long-term video footage in order to measure parental feeding rates, and test whether feeding rates depend on the genotypes of the offspring. Unfortunately the computer scientist we were collaborating with in order to develop machine learning techniques for processing video has been snapped up by the tech industry. We are currently looking at plausible alternatives. |
Exploitation Route | We hope this research, once completed and written up, will encourage other scientists to tackle similar questions. |
Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Environment |
Title | Blue Tit Data |
Description | All data collected on the Dalmeny Blue Tit population |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | The data is open access and actively maintained. |
URL | https://osf.io/n3jgy/ |
Title | Data from: No evidence for sibling or parent-offspring coadaptation in a wild population of blue tits, despite high power. |
Description | |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2018 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Title | MCMCglmm |
Description | The software fits a range of statistical models used commonly across the sciences. Additional capabilities have been added to support models required for this grant. |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The software has been cited nearly 700 times (Google Scholar) since its release in 2010. |
URL | http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MCMCglmm/index.html |