Download THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES IN

THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIMENTAL
STUDIES IN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Douglas J. Futuyma and Albert F. Bennett
The major approaches to analyzing
evolutionary processes:
• Experimental Evolution
• Studies of Natural Populations
• Comparative methods
Experimental Evolution
• AdvantagesReplication and
control.
• Disadvantages –
suited to laboratory
rather than to natural
situations.
Natural Populations
• Advantage- offer
ecological realism
• Disadvantage - lack
of ability to replicate
results and control
variables.
Comparative Methods
• Advantage- widely
used method to
understand evolution
of characters in the
natural world.
• Disadvantage• Correlational
• Assumption of
parsimony
2 Examples of the Contribution of Experimental
Studies to understand Evolution
• Trade-offs- adaptive
gain and correlated
loss.
• Escherichia Coli
• Genetic Drift – a
founder event (or bottleneck in
population size) may initiate
new paths of adaptive
evolution.
• Drosophila pseudoobscura