Madagascar’s lemurs are the most endangered group of mammals in the world, with 94% of species threatened with extinction. Forest loss is one the greatest threat to these arboreal primates, but hunting, habitat degradation, and climate change also threaten their survival. Lemurs…
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As a biological species, humans continue to adapt genetically to various environments through natural selection. However, cultural and lifestyle changes often occur much more rapidly than those biological changes, leading in some cases to a mismatch between our biology as a spec…
The regulation of gene expression, timing, location, and amount of a given project, ultimately affects the cellular structure and function. More broadly, gene regulation is the basis for cellular differentiation and development. However, gene expression is not uniform among indi…
The creation and evaluation of known evolutionary histories and the implementation of student investigatory experiences on evolution are difficult endeavors that have only recently been feasible. The research presented in this dissertation is related in their shared use of digit…
Phylogeography combines geographic information with phylogenetic analysis to gain insight into the origin, dispersal, and speciation dynamics of populations. Advances in the utility of Next Generation Sequencing technology has led to a shift toward whole genome sequencing for an…
Understanding the relationships between lifestyle, ecology and physiology is essential for understanding variation in health, life history, and subsistence practice among populations. Previous work has investigated human behavioral ecology and life history across a wide range of…
The rate of accumulation of nucleic acid sequence data produced by next generation sequencing technology has in some ways outpaced the development of theory and methods for analyzing such data. In this dissertation, I explore the advantages of, and how to best implement, whole g…
Hybridization has traditionally been viewed as a happenstance that negatively impacts populations, but is now recognized as an important evolutionary mechanism that can substantially impact the evolutionary trajectories of gene pools, influence adaptive capacity, and contravene …
Non-coding RNAs hold important regulatory functions in cells, but little attention has been given to how these functions evolved. ciRS-7 (CDR1-as) is a circular non-coding RNA known to act as a “sponge” for microRNA (miRNA), allowing rapid changes to gene expression. Because it …
All environments in nature fluctuate, and a globally common mode of fluctuation is cyclical: daily, tidal, seasonal, and even decadal. Organisms must adapt the scheduling of their life cycles-or 'life-histories'-to fit the cycles of the physical environments in which they reside…
Studying how island biotas evolve and are dynamically shaped by interactions between resident species, their immediate environments and neighboring continental communities have provided basic understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes operating in these ecosystems. H…
The gram-positive bacterial genus Staphylococcus (phylum Firmicutes) is a heterogeneous group that consists of commensals and opportunistic pathogens of humans and animals. To date, there are 57 validly published species according to the List of Prokaryotic names with Standing i…
Lecithotrophic (non-feeding) larval development has independently evolved numerous times in marine invertebrates from an ancestral, planktotrophic (feeding) larval state. The evolution of this developmental mode in a species is accompanied by dramatic changes in ecology and deve…
Several recent evolutionary debunking arguments have attempted to undermine moral realism. In what follows, I offer a novel, Aristotelian Naturalist response to these skeptical challenges and, in the process, I add to the growing case for Aristotelian Naturalism. I begin by disa…
The arthropod subphylum Chelicerata underwent a history of early and rapid diversification that has proven difficult to resolve through phylogenomic analyses. Different rates of evolution among chelicerates drives this difficulty through long branch attraction, a systematic arti…
Evolution acts at the level of populations. From differences in allele frequencies or trait frequencies among populations, we can make inferences about the forces that are most important in selection and gene flow at a specific point in time for specific systems. In this dissert…
Phylogenetic trees are key objects for understanding evolutionary history, first used to describe relationships between groups of species. Phylogenies help us to fill out the tree of life and to describe the dynamics that have given rise to the diversity of life on Earth. As we …
A central question in genetics asks how genetic variation influences phenotypic variation. The distribution of genetic variation in a population is reflective of the evolutionary forces that shape and maintain genetic diversity such as mutation, natural selection, and genetic dr…
This dissertation is primarily focused on understanding the generation and maintenance of phenotypic diversity through ecological selection. Natural selection acts on the phenotype because the phenotype lies at the interface between an organisms genotype and its environment. Thu…