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Todd H. Oakley added New information, new perspectives on origins.tex
about 10 years ago
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\subsection{New information, new perspectives on origins}
New information and new technologies allow for new perspectives on evolutionary origins of traits. Perhaps the biggest advances in understanding evolutionary origins come from our newfound and ever increasing understanding of connections between genotype and phenotype, fueled by knowledge about the molecular components of traits. Historically, it was not possible to go far beyond the gradual-morphological model of eye evolution because understanding how variation originates requires genetic knowledge. Similarly, while phylogeneticists historically could score the presence or absence of a trait like an eye by simply looking at a species, knowing the components of those eyes and their homology to each other requires more information. Even when molecular components became known from a model organism, extending that knowledge outside models was not feasible, making comparative, evolutionary studies intractable. We now know many molecular components of eyes, which we review below, and we now feasibly can obtain extensive information on these components from non-model organisms. When these components are proteins, we can trace their individual evolutionary histories. Instead of forcing the all-or-none perspective that is implicit in scoring traits like eyes as ‘present’ or ‘absent’, tracing individual histories of components allows us to understand that some components are ancient and others are new. In this way, understanding when components of multi-part systems came together is leading us to new questions and insights about origins.
