Mounting evidence of climatic effects on riverine environments and adaptive responses of fishes have elicited growing conservation concerns. Measures to rectify population declines include assessment of local extinction risk, population ecology, viability, and genetic differentiation. While conservation planning has been largely informed by neutral genetic structure, there has been a dearth of ...

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to uncover the genetic basis of adaptation. Divergent selection exerted on ecological traits may result in adaptive population differentiation and reproductive isolation and affect differentially the level of genetic divergence along the genome. Genome-wide scan of large sets of individuals from multiple populations is a powerful approach to identify loci...

A central theme underlying studies of adaptive radiation is that ecologically mediated selection drives diversification. However, demonstrating the ecological basis of natural selection and linking this process to patterns of morphological diversity represents a formidable challenge. This is because selection experiments that test correlations between an organism's phenotype and its ecology are...

Divergent cumulative cultural evolution occurs when the cultural evolutionary trajectory diverges from the biological evolutionary trajectory. We consider the conditions under which divergent cumulative cultural evolution can occur. We hypothesize that two conditions are necessary. First that genetic and cultural information are stored separately in the agent. Second cultural information must b...

Divergent sexual selection within allopatric populations may result in divergent sexual phenotypes, which can act as reproductive barriers between populations upon secondary contact. This hypothesis has been most tested on traits involved in precopulatory sexual selection, with less work focusing on traits that act after copulation and before fertilization (i.e., postcopulatory prezygotic trait...

Improvement in the efficiency and quality of animal production can be achieved by improving several characteristics simultaneously. For example, we may want to breed the ideal dairy cow that produces not only a lot of milk, but also with a high percentage of components like fat and especially protein. In addition, such high producing animals should preferably have no fertility problems, not suf...