ArticleNature communications2024
Stability of ecologically scaffolded traits during evolutionary transitions in individuality.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary dynamics of nascent multicellular lineages.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Individuality Through Ecology: Rethinking the Evolution of Complex Life From an Externalist Perspective.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Evolutionary transitions in individuality are events in the history of life leading to the emergence of new levels of individuality. Recent studies have described an ecological scaffolding scenario of such transitions focused on the evolutionary consequences of an externally imposed renewing meta-population structure with limited dispersal. One difficulty for such a scenario has been explaining the stability of collective-level traits when scaffolding conditions no longer apply. Here, we show that the stability of scaffolded traits can rely on evolutionary hysteresis: even if the environment is reverted to an ancestral state, collectives do not return to ancestral phenotypes. We describe this phenomenon using a stochastic meta-population model and adaptive dynamics. Further, we show that ecological scaffolding may be limited to Goldilocks zones of the environment. We conjecture that Goldilocks zones-even if they might be rare-could act as initiators of evolutionary transitions and help to explain the near ubiquity of collective-level individuality.
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