It’s not a great time to be in the sciences, is it?
Read Niles Eldredge’s obituary for Elizabeth Vrba if you don’t know who she is.
Vrba argued that the width of the niche that a species can occupy drives rates of both speciation and extinction, with the environment being the main force underlying this evolution. Her ‘effect hypothesis’ proposed that apparent directional trends in evolution are accumulations of increasing specialization inside lineages of narrow-niched species — a phenomenon she later referred to as species sorting — and are not necessarily manifestations of species selection.
Her emphasis on the importance of interactions with the environment has colored my own views on evolution. Now I’m wishing I could teach my ecological development course again and increase that perspective, but unfortunately, I feel a bit like a lame duck at my university, confined to teaching core service courses until the day I die (not out of any problem, but just because we’re under tight constraints to teach the absolutely necessary curriculum, and it would be better for junior faculty to explore new ideas), and I fear I’m going to be teaching nothing but cell biology and genetics for quite a while.
Every morning since 2016.
(Opens newspaper)
“FUUUUCK!”
It is fortunate I dislike most alcohol beverages.
I had read her collaborative work with Gould on exaptation.
I don’t know if this does justice to the concept:
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/exaptations/
I remember Gould often making a distinction between historic origin and current utility which seems connected. Exaptation may be quite common in molecular evolution given Ohno’s notion of duplication and divergence. Anatomically I’m thinking of our ear bones which were once part of a distant ancestor’s jaw articulation.
“Now I’m wishing I could teach my ecological development course again and increase that perspective”
PZ could you post your lectures for that course here, or maybe on a side channel? Or does it require too much foreknowledge of biology and genetics and such to be appropriate for a lay audience?
@#3 Hemidactylus
I don’t really get the difference between adaptation and exaptation. Your link gives the example of bat echolocation as an adaptation, but I assume EL was derived from vocalizations that initially had a social function such as attracting mates or warning the tribe about danger, and presumably those functions still exist. So ISTM echolocation is an additional ability that the vocal and aural structures provide in addition to their original functions, and isn’t that the definition of an exaptation? Therefore, aren’t all adaptations exaptations, at least initially? The original functions may become lost, in which case I guess one could call the remaining function an adaptation, but don’t all adaptations start out as exaptations?
moarscienceplz @5
Here’s an article by Vrba and Gould on their rationale for exaptation as a term:
https://www2.hawaii.edu/~khayes/Journal_Club/fall2006/Gould_&_Vrb_1982_Paleobio.pdf
Also I guess because she was a woman her contribution will now be downplayed or erased because anti-DEI – Discrimination Inequity & Exclsuion (DIE)* is now the law too.
.* See : https://freethoughtblogs.com/seymour/2025/02/08/discrimination-inequity-and-exclusion-die-2/
I’m always a little surprised when women die.