We will decide if we pass through that gauntlet or -- like our cousins the Neanderthals -- become evolutionary dead ends.
Importantly, this effect will be especially noticeable over short evolutionary distances: "neutral" ESR-like motifs will become disrupted relatively rapidly over evolutionary time, towards the limit in which all neutral motifs have been disrupted (analogous to the phenomenon of 'saturation' at individual sites); functionally important changes will be slower, and accumulate over longer timescales.
As it becomes feasible to collect these data in large and cosmopolitan samples within a species, population genetics approaches and evolutionary modeling will become increasingly important and informative.
If the hybridization is a success, genes or alleles with separate evolutionary histories will become introduced into the offspring.
An additional advantage is that longer evolutionary time-scales will become accessible for study.
So far, there is no indication as to whether other methods will become available soon for large-scale evolutionary studies like the one discussed here.
Consequently, very little is known about the details of adaptation from standing genetic variation (but see Orr and Betancourt 2001; Hermisson and Pennings 2005), that is, which of the alleles segregating in a population will become fixed and contribute to the evolutionary response.
No such experiments have yet been reported, although we expect that they will become an important item on the agenda of evolutionary biology in the first decade of Evolutionary Applications.
The evolutionary and developmental mechanisms will become clearer as known regulators of the B class genes are isolated and functionally characterized in spinach and in other species that produce imperfect flowers.
Given the difficulty of this estimation problem, I anticipate that full-likelihood methods that can leverage all of the information present in the sequence data will become increasingly important for robustly estimating shared evolutionary history across taxa [ 45].
