Dr. Nathalie Feiner, MPI Plön

Nathalie Feiner from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, will give a talk:

Unraveling the drivers of evolutionary diversification and innovation

“Life may seem indefinitely capable of evolving. Yet, some organisms remain unchanged for tens of millions of years while others rapidly diversify into a huge variety of shapes and colours. Ecological opportunity and varying selective regimes provide part of the explanation for such differences, but these explanations fail to account for how genetic and developmental processes enable, direct and promote diversification and innovation.
My research fills this gap by studying the spectacular diversity of colors and patterns in Mediterranean wall lizards, which has puzzled naturalists since the 19th century. Recent theory and methods allow us to make sense of this “chaos of variation” and to finally unravel the developmental causes of convergent evolution and the existence of hypervariable clades.
In this talk, I will focus on our work on the repeated evolution of a novel suite of coloration, morphology and behavior – a syndrome – in wall lizards. Integrating evolutionary genomics with developmental biology and ecology, I will explain how this research allows us to establish the causes of evolvability, spanning from how neural crest cells enable traits to evolve together to how hybridization fuels adaptive variation.”

Host:

Prof. Schulenburg