On most weekends, you can find Indiana University graduate student Sam Cohen at Bloomington Animal Care and Control, a local animal shelter where she has volunteered for two years as a pet adoption counselor. She gets to know the dogs, talks with visitors, and helps them identify which dogs they might want to adopt. But,… Read more »
In a previous post, I briefly discussed something called genetic correlation and how this might be important for the evolution of a trait. Now, I hope to further clarify that concept and add to that a discussion of a very important concept in evolutionary biology—heritability—and tie it back to my initial discussion of the evolution… Read more »
Consider briefly the process of evolution and you might imagine a lumbering process, splitting lineages and bringing new species forth from old, or the gradual formation of morphological novelties like wings. While it’s true that evolutionary processes such as the formation of new species are generally slow by our standards, other effects of evolution that… Read more »
How do species adapt to new conditions? For a couple hundred years, the answer has been that incremental change in parents trickles down to offspring over generations in a population, giving us the process of biological evolution. That is just as true as ever, but it appears to be a bit more complicated. Where once… Read more »