Piketty focuses on the increasing divergence of the income and wealth distributions between the top percentile and everyone else.
However, it is also possible that with the increasing divergence of genomes, gene replacements increasingly involve metabolic, signal transduction, and other gene modules, so that selection becomes relevant only for the conservation of the core genes that largely encode components of information processing systems.
Increased divergence of maternally expressed genes might have its cause in increased mutation rates, reduced purifying selection, or positive selection.
Increased divergence of DNA and protein sequences (p < 0.03) and elevation of Ka (p < 0.03) of maternally expressed genes became slightly more significant.
The repeated spells of cooling in the Pleistocene could also have increased divergence of the genetic lineages in this environmentally sensitive species.
Comparisons with other species, for which fewer sequences of imprinted genes are available, show a tendency towards increased divergence of murine imprinted genes as well (additional file 2).
More important, these nodes showed an increased divergence of within/between-module connections, which were defined as a differential functional connectivity.
In a previous study, we concluded that the increased divergence of maternally expressed genes occurred most likely due to reduced selective pressure [ 31].
Because we expected increased divergence of CDL with thermoperiod amplitude, we reared the southern populations under shorter day lengths than the northern populations and, thus, did not include the complete experimental design for the highest thermoperiod amplitude.
* p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05 (Wilcoxon test for comparison of the respective group to genome data) Comparing the human to dog, cow, and chimpanzee, maternally expressed genes exhibit the lowest identities on DNA and protein levels, thereby supporting an increased divergence of maternally expressed genes (additional file 2).
Chromosome IV is of particular interest, as the gene related to lateral plate number variation – Ectodysplasin A (eda) [ 46] – is located within a genomic region of increased divergence on this chromosome.
