Ecology, Fitness, Evolution

Evolution & Ecology

Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley; Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley; Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Panama; current address Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC The capacity for aerial manoeuvring shaped...

How ecology shapes caste evolution: linking resource use, morphology, performance and fitness in a superorganism.

Caste evolution is a central process in the adaptive diversification of insect superorganisms. Nevertheless, how ecology shapes adaptive caste evolution remains poorly understood. Recent work with the ant genus Cephalotes has provided new comparative evidence that ecological specialization may drive adaptive caste specialization. Here, three key predictions of this adaptive hypothesis are suppo...

Ecology and Evolution Retreat

09:20 Christopher Noto and Ari Grossman Using functional morphology to compare dinosaur ecological diversity Studies of ecological diversity seek to quantify functional groups to understand community structure. Fossil communities represent a special challenge because direct measurement of the once living ecosystem is impossible, and we must rely on indirect methods to infer ecology. Fortunately...

Ecology and Evolution

Fitness landscapes and evolution

The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of the adaptative walk model, a short review is given of the quasispecies approach to molecular evolution and to the error threshold. The relevance of flat fit...