Please Don't Eat the Daisies: The macroevolution of alternate plant defense strategies
(Phys.org) —As is the case in all areas of science, our understanding of evolutionary biology is… well, evolving. Two such areas are macroevolution (any evolutionary change at or above the level of species – that is, on a scale of separated gene pools) and microevolution (any evolutionary change below the level of species, such as the effect of changes in allele frequency on phenotype). Interestingly, macroevolution and microevolution can be seen as describing fundamentally identical processes on different time scales. Through their divergent effects on population genetics, sexual reproduction strategies could significantly influence phenotypic expression – but the impact of mating system transitions has not been well understood. Recently, however, scientists at Cornell University have shown that the repeated, unidirectional transition from self-incompatibility to self-compatibility (increased inbreeding) leads to the evolution of an inducible (a gene whose expression is responsive to environmental change) – as opposed to a constitutive (a...