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Environment Focus: Recent Study reveals about the Evolution process on earth may be predictable which is considered a rather random process

Evolution has long been considered a rather random process, with species’ traits shaped by random mutations and environmental events and thus largely unpredictable. But an international team of scientists led by researchers from Yale University and Columbia University found that a particular plant lineage independently evolved three similar types of leaves over and over again in mountainous regions scattered throughout the Neotropics.

The findings provided the first examples in plants of a phenomenon known as “replicative radiation”, in which similar forms repeatedly evolve in different areas, suggesting that evolution is not always such a random process but can be predicted. it may actually be, with organismal evolution and natural selection combining under certain circumstances to produce the same forms over and over again,” said Yale’s Michael Donoghue, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-corresponding author. “Perhaps evolutionary biology can become a much more predictive science than we have ever imagined in the past.”

For this study, the research team studied the genetics and morphology of the Viburnum plant lineage, a genus of flowering plants that began to spread southward from Mexico to Central and South America about 10 million years ago. Donoghue studied the same plant group for his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard 40 years ago. At the time, he argued in favor of an alternative theory in which large, hairy leaves and small, smooth leaves developed early in the group’s evolution, and then the two forms migrated separately, dispersed by birds across different mountain ranges.

However, the new genetic analyzes presented in this paper show that two different types of leaves evolved independently, in parallel, in each of the many mountain regions.”I came to the wrong conclusion because I lacked the relevant genomic data. 1970s,” Donoghue said.

The team found that a very similar set of leaf types evolved in nine of the 11 areas studied. However, a full range of leaf types may not yet develop in places where viburnum has only recently migrated. For example, the highlands of Bolivia lack the large hairy types of leaves found in other wetter areas with little sunlight in the cloud forests of Mexico, Central America, and northern South America.

“These plants arrived in Bolivia less than a million years ago, so we predict that the large, hairy leaf form will eventually evolve in Bolivia as well,” Donoghue said. Several examples of replicate radiation have been found in animals such as Anolis lizards in the Caribbean. In that case, the same set of body forms, or “ectomorphs,” evolved independently on several different islands. With the plant example now in hand, evolutionary biologists will try to uncover the general circumstances under which reliable predictions about evolutionary trajectories can be made.

“This decades-long collaborative work has revealed an amazing new system for studying evolutionary adaptation,” said Ericka Edwards, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and co-author of the paper. “Now that we have established the pattern, our next challenge is to better understand the functional significance of these leaf types and the underlying genetic architecture that allows them to reappear.”

Source Journal reference: Michael J. Donoghue, Deren A. R. Eaton, Carlos A. Maya-Lastra, Michael J. Landis, Patrick W. Sweeney, Mark E. Olson, N. Ivalú Cacho, Morgan K. Moeglein, Jordan R. Gardner, Nora M. Heaphy, Matiss Castorena, Alí Segovia Rivas, Wendy L. Clement, Erika J. Edwards. Replicated radiation of a plant clade along a cloud forest archipelagoNature Ecology & Evolution, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01823-x

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