ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

Flies as Ship Captains? Digital Evolution Unravels Selective Pressures to Avoid Collision in Drosophila

142   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Christoph Adami
 تاريخ النشر 2016
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

Flies that walk in a covered planar arena on straight paths avoid colliding with each other, but which of the two flies stops is not random. High-throughput video observations, coupled with dedicated experiments with controlled robot flies have revealed that flies utilize the type of optic flow on their retina as a determinant of who should stop, a strategy also used by ship captains to determine which of two ships on a collision course should throw engines in reverse. We use digital evolution to test whether this strategy evolves when collision avoidance is the sole penalty. We find that the strategy does indeed evolve in a narrow range of cost/benefit ratios, for experiments in which the regressive motion cue is error free. We speculate that these stringent conditions may not be sufficient to evolve the strategy in real flies, pointing perhaps to auxiliary costs and benefits not modeled in our study

قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

How cooperation emerges in human societies is still a puzzle. Evolutionary game theory has been the standard framework to address this issue. In most models, every individual plays with all others, and then reproduce and die according to what they ea rn. This amounts to assuming that selection takes place at a slow pace with respect to the interaction time scale. We show that, quite generally, if selection speeds up, the evolution outcome changes dramatically. Thus, in games such as Harmony, where cooperation is the only equilibrium and the only rational outcome, rapid selection leads to dominance of defectors. Similar non trivial phenomena arise in other binary games and even in more complicated settings such as the Ultimatum game. We conclude that the rate of selection is a key element to understand and model the emergence of cooperation, and one that has so far been overlooked.
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional traits. Ho wever, while the theory behind the origins and maintenance of genetic and species diversity has been studied for decades, theory concerning the origin of diverse functional circuits is still in its infancy. It is not known how many different circuit structures can implement any given function, which evolutionary factors lead to different circuits, and whether the evolution of a particular circuit was due to adaptive or non-adaptive processes. Here, we use digital experimental evolution to study the diversity of neural circuits that encode motion detection in digital (artificial) brains. We find that evolution leads to an enormous diversity of potential neural architectures encoding motion detection circuits, even for circuits encoding the exact same function. Evolved circuits vary in both redundancy and complexity (as previously found in genetic circuits) suggesting that similar evolutionary principles underlie circuit formation using any substrate. We also show that a simple (designed) motion detection circuit that is optimally-adapted gains in complexity when evolved further, and that selection for mutational robustness led this gain in complexity.
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like adaptive zones, punctuated equilibrium and blunderbuss patterns, require more elaborate explanations than a simple gradual ac cumulation of mutations. Here we argue that non-uniform evolutionary increases in phenotypic complexity can be caused by a threshold-like response to growing ecological pressures resulting from evolutionary diversification at a given level of complexity. Acquisition of a new phenotypic feature allows an evolving species to escape this pressure but can typically be expected to carry significant physiological costs. Therefore, the ecological pressure should exceed a certain level to make such an acquisition evolutionarily successful. We present a detailed quantitative description of this process using a microevolutionary competition model as an example. The model exhibits sequential increases in phenotypic complexity driven by diversification at existing levels of complexity and the resulting increase in competitive pressure, which can push an evolving species over the barrier of physiological costs of new phenotypic features.
67 - Barak Kol 2017
Bats are unique mammals. This note discusses some questions regarding bat evolution including why they are nocturnal and why they can echolocate. It is hypothesized that echolocation was necessary for bats to survive the period of limited visibility that followed the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event.
In many species, genomic data have revealed pervasive adaptive evolution indicated by the fixation of beneficial alleles. However, when selection pressures are highly variable along a species range or through time adaptive alleles may persist at inte rmediate frequencies for long periods. So called balanced polymorphisms have long been understood to be an important component of standing genetic variation yet direct evidence of the strength of balancing selection and the stability and prevalence of balanced polymorphisms has remained elusive. We hypothesized that environmental fluctuations between seasons in a North American orchard would impose temporally variable selection on Drosophila melanogaster and consequently maintain allelic variation at polymorphisms adaptively evolving in response to climatic variation. We identified hundreds of polymorphisms whose frequency oscillates among seasons and argue that these loci are subject to strong, temporally variable selection. We show that these polymorphisms respond to acute and persistent changes in climate and are associated in predictable ways with seasonally variable phenotypes. In addition, we show that adaptively oscillating polymorphisms are likely millions of years old, with some likely predating the divergence between D. melanogaster and D. simulans. Taken together, our results demonstrate that rapid temporal fluctuations in climate over generational time promotes adaptive genetic diversity at loci affecting polygenic phenotypes.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا