NEW PAPER: Dollo's law and evolutionary reversals

 Published this week is a new paper I wrote with Jean Clobert, asking 'how to study (putative) evolutionary reversals?' We look at the current state of agreement about what is needed, provide some history and context to the arguments about Dollo's law, and finally propose a roadmap for how to test evolutionary reversals now that we are in the so-called post-genomic era. 


Open access paper available in Trends in Ecology and Evolution


Thanks to TULIP for funding a research visit that let me work on this paper at SETE


Abstract

Dollo’s law of irreversibility argues that evolution cannot revert to earlier states. It has remained controversial ever since its inception in the 19th century. Enabled by advances in phylogenomics and functional genomics, recent studies show that there are very likely some cases of ‘breaking Dollo’s law’. As post-genomic research grows from showing patterns to revealing processes, new emphasis is needed on the molecular mechanisms by which Dollo’s law might be broken. Shifting the argument from ‘if it happened’ to ‘how it happened’ will provide richer understanding of organismal and evolutionary biology. Motivated by case studies and novel avenues to test trait loss and regain, we outline a set of alternative hypotheses to be evaluated and what the outcomes tell us about evolution.




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