This paper provides constraints on the evolution of the landscape in the Cradle of Humankind (CoH), UNESCO World Heritage Site, South Africa, since the Pliocene.
To examine the effects of these physical constraints on the evolution of foraging strategies, we modified a recent evolution simulation designed for Daphnia by adding an energy penalty proportional to each turning angle used by modelled foraging agents.
Our results showed that the evolutionary rate of a gene is significantly negatively related to its "total constraint intensity", which was defined as a proxy of multiple constraints on the evolution of genes in a module context, whereas the weak negative correlation between the "number of interactors", "number of interactions" and the corresponding Ka/Ks ratios is not significant.
Such interactions require a balance between expression levels of all genes in a group of interacting genes, which imposes constraints on the evolution of regulation of individual genes, resulting in lower opportunity for transcriptional compensation.
These observations indicate that the structure of molecular networks impose constraints on the evolution of their components.
A more direct evidence of the genetic constraints on the evolution of LES is from the relationship between PASS distance and phylogenetic distance.
By comparing spider silk to other materials, we can infer the constraints on the evolution of signalling properties in terms of material structure.
An enhanced auditory sensitivity to these frequencies raises the possibility that the acoustic and auditory specializations of aye-ayes have imposed constraints on the evolution of their vocal signals, especially their primary long-distance vocalization, the screech.
Their analyses revealed a consistent association of decreases in limb length, digit loss, and body elongation across ecologically and phylogenetically diverse squamate clades, indicating an influence of shared functional and developmental constraints on the evolution of body form.
However, the potential influence of structural molecular constraints on the evolution of complexity is only just starting to be understood (Prendergast and Semple, 2011; Fernández and Lynch, 2011; Chambers et al., 2013), and the implications of these structural and mechanistic constraints for evolutionary models must still be investigated in depth.
