Sexual imprinting on ecologically divergent traits leads to sexual isolation in sticklebacks
Excerpt: “Odour differences may be owing to pleiotropic effects of adaptive differences in diet [18], habitat [12] and major histocompatibility complex (MHC) alleles selected by parasite differences [19,20].”
Excerpt: “…imprinting has turned odour and nuptial coloration into magic traits.”
My comment: In my model, natural odour production in vertebrates is not a magic trait. It results from the role of food odours in nutrient-dependent RNA-mediated ecological niche construction. Food odours epigenetically link the metabolism of nutrients to pheromones, which are social odours that control nutrient-dependent reproduction. The only magic, which suddenly appears as if it were a rabbit pulled from a hat, is the magic of evolutionary theory that attempts to link nuptial coloration (and the automagical visual appeal of conspecifics) directly to cause and effect without the involvement of receptors that link sensory stimuli from the social environment to hormones and vertebrate behavior. In my model, for comparison to the magic of theory, de novo creation of olfactory receptor genes eliminates the “rabbit pulled from a hat” trick, and eliminates mutation-driven evolution from any further consideration except in theories that incorporate magic and the “Just-So” stories those theories have inspired.
Additional information: “…newly established populations have diverged over the course of only 10 to 15,000 years in response to different ecological conditions…”
My comment: Information about the number of different stickleback species that have adaptively evolved during the past 10 to 15,000 years refutes the concept of mutation-driven evolution, which has not been modeled in the context of the physiology of reproduction or chromosomal rearrangements in any species. I vaguely recall reading about the number of species of stickleback that have been identified, but cannot recall whether that number refers to the historical record, or to those that currently exist.
Evolutionary theorists who are interested in data-driven models might be interested in learning more about the number of different stickleback species and attempts to consider that number in the context of mutations theory. For now, however, it appears that stickleback adaptive evolution, like the adaptive evolution of all species from microbes to man during the past 10 to 15,000 years, is nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled. This would place stickleback evolution into the context of Darwin’s ‘conditions of life” during much longer periods of time, but still sans mutations theory.
