Experiment gives insight into how species maintain diversity
(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the big problems evolutionary biologists have to wrangle with is in trying to explain why members of an individual species aren’t more alike. If say, high testosterone in males makes them more aggressive, for example, and thus more successful at mating, why doesn’t the level of testosterone level off at some point as that trait is passed on to successive generations while those with lower levels continue to lose out? And how do so-called antagonistic traits between the genders contribute to diversity? If males with more testosterone get to mate more, but more testosterone in females leads to smaller litters, how do the two traits work together to ensure that diversity wins in the end? Well, nobody really knows for sure, but a group of international researchers has taken a step towards figuring it out. In their paper published in Science the team shows that so-called...