Evolution does repeat itself after all: How evolution lets stripes come and go


same stuff happened multiple times, independently in various lakes, and at a record speed …

Evolution does repeat itself after all: How evolution lets stripes come and go

A team of evolutionary biologists discovers the genetic basis for the repeated evolution of color patterns. The findings about the stripes of the especially diverse species of East-African cichlid fishes explain how evolution can repeat itself at record speed.

this is weird:

If we use CRISPR-Cas to remove the gene from the genome of a species without stripes,” Kratochwil explains, “then even a “stripeless” fish will suddenly develop stripes, as we showed with a CRISPR-Cas mutant fish. This proves that the stripes gene is the decisive genetic factor.

the author of the article also mentioned Dollo’s law of irreversibility

If characteristics are lost during evolution, usually this loss is forever, as the Belgian palaeontologist Louis Dollo already realized exactly 125 years ago, and wrote up his conclusions in “Dolls Law” in 1893. The special aspect of the stripes gene agrp2 is that it makes repeated evolution of a characteristic possible in a simple way.

Mr. Dollo would be surprised to see the following article

Have wings come, gone and come again?

Can complex traits be re-evolved by lineages that have lost them? Phylogenetic study now suggests that wings may indeed have reappeared several times within the ancestrally wingless stick insects ( www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov )


finally, the author of the cichlid fishes article concluded:

These molecular-biological studies also show that palaeontological rules and evolutionary rules have to be questioned once again.

evolutionary rules have to be questioned once again ? you think ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181025142037.htm