Reply to ‘Evolutionary stasis of viruses?’

Reply to "Complexities of Estimating Evolutionary Rates in Viruses".

We appreciate the valuable feedback offered by Dr. Holmes (1) and would like to follow up on some of the important points. The goal of our study was to evaluate the feasibility of identifying areas in which to focus surveillance efforts to better detect the emergence of new influenza strains and subtypes, using the currently available data, both for potential targeting of future surveillance an...

Reply to Dvořák et al.: Apparent evolutionary stasis of ancient subseafloor sulfur cycling biocoenoses.

We thank Dvo rák et al. for their comment (1) on our paper (2), in which we compare sulfur-cycling ∼1.8and ∼2.3-Ga fossil communities with their modern counterparts and report that the community fabric of the fossil and modern microbes, as well as their organismal and cellular morphology, their interlinked energy-production via anaerobic sulfate-reduction and sulfur species oxidation, and their...

Evolutionary stasis in pollen morphogenesis due to natural selection.

The contribution of developmental constraints and selective forces to the determination of evolutionary patterns is an important and unsolved question. We test whether the long-term evolutionary stasis observed for pollen morphogenesis (microsporogenesis) in eudicots is due to developmental constraints or to selection on a morphological trait shaped by microsporogenesis: the equatorial aperture...

Evolutionary and classical concepts of homology: a reply to Aboitiz.

ABOITIZ MARK WILKINSON Aboitiz (1988) proposed a return to pre-Darwinian concepts of homology. The main points raised by this author can be summarized as follows. I. A distinction can be drawn between the modern evolutionary concept of homology, indicating a common evolutionary origin of morphological traits, genes or proteins and pre-Darwinian concepts of homology (here termed 'classical homol...

Understanding Cultural Evolutionary Models a Reply to Read’s Critique