Evo Devo
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2007Over at Karmatics, Rob Brown thinks the counter-intuitiveness of natural selection is a big reason why people find evolution difficult to comprehend. In that way, natural selection is similar to prediction markets, where people bet on the chances of future events, such as the outcomes of sports events or political elections:
Prediction markets turn out to be remarkably accurate, typically more accurate than any individual expert can predict, as non-intuitive as it may seem. Like Wikipedia, prediction markets also tap into the power of selection, but the most dramatic similarity they share…
mikethemadbiologist | June 21, 2007In the May edition of Evolution, Hopi Hoekstra and Jerry Coyne have an interesting commentary, "The Locus of Evolution: Evo Devo and the Genetics of Adaptation." They raise two points about "evo devo" (the fusion of developmental and evolutionary biology) that have always bothered me. From the abstract (boldface mine):
An important tenet of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo devo") is that adaptive mutations affecting morphology are more likely to occur in the cis-regulatory regions than in the protein-coding regions of genes. This argument rests on two claims: (1) the modular nature…