New research contradicts contemporary theories and shows that promiscuity slows down evolution https://t.co/aP9VErn2uo
— Wiley Evolution (@Darwin2009) May 30, 2017
The tweet above from Wiley relates to a paper, Polygamy slows down population divergence in shorebirds. It’s a cool paper. I tweeted it. But does it relate to the “rate of evolution”?
There’s no definitive answer to this question. Different people will have different answers, as it was evident on Twitter. For me my surprise was due to my definition for what evolution is: change is allele frequencies over time. This is far more fundamental than speciation. But then I don’t think much about speciation.
Some people brought up divergence. But divergence for me is not necessary, a population could remain unitary but exhibit large allele frequency changes. Then again, if you study phylogenetics on a macroevolutionary scale, as most people who study phylogenetics do, then you would focus on divergence.
“divergence for me is not necessary, a population could remain unitary but exhibit large allele frequency changes.”
For many prokaryotes, there is no real hard division between self and not-self. Horizontal transfer is widespread.
There are Archaea with up to 15% Bacterial genes, and Bacteria with up to 25% Archaeal genes.
But you have to classify them in some way(s).
I think the most common concepts of ‘species’ only apply to multicellular Eukaryotes.