In Fig. 5, we give a demonstration of the evolutionary branching in the stochastic environment.
These findings are in line with the recent demonstration of three evolutionary lineages within the Mimiviridae (Colson et al. 2012).
Finally, our study provides a demonstration of the evolutionary insights that can be gleaned from detailed studies of well-documented animal pedigrees.
However, the family Proteaceae can be traced to 113 Ma (Lower Cretaceous) [ 12] and holds promise as a demonstration of unconstrained evolutionary responses to fire as it is considered to have rainforest-climate (non-fireprone) origins and its extant fire-adapted traits in fireprone floras are well known.
The latter finding extends the demonstration of how simple evolutionary processes can result in complex structures [ 48] to the domain of system dynamics.
We also summarize studies that have shown evolutionary potential (i.e. the trait is heritable and/or under selection) in traits with putative associations with climate change and discuss future directions that need to be undertaken before a conclusive demonstration of plastic or evolutionary responses to climate change in wild mammals can be made.
The students reliably identify the three major environmental contexts for the evolution of infanticide (lack of resources, offspring quality, uncertain parentage), thereby providing an impressive demonstration of the power of evolutionary theory to make predictions about the traits of organisms not just for infanticide but for innumerable traits in all species (see Wilson 2007, ch. 3).
"It's a compelling demonstration of how techniques of evolutionary analysis developed for viruses can be applied to bacterial pathogens, provided full genome data are available," says Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who studies HIV, influenza, and hepatitis C viruses.
It would be a powerful demonstration of the unifying potential of evolutionary theory, if the classic quantitative genetics analyses of adaptive landscapes could one day be combined with current systems biology models for analysing mutational effects that have so far been too small for direct observations.
In addition to the two examples shown above for the purpose of demonstration, SynFind has enabled a number of evolutionary studies of important functional genes in diverse lineages (Woodhouse et al. 2010; Tang and Lyons 2012; Hofberger et al. 2013; Waters et al. 2013).
