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Mechanisms of Regressive Evolution

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Evolution in the Dark

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Abstract

In the face of the neodarwinian paradigm of selection as an agent exclusively claimed to explain evolutionary processes in recent days, almost countless efforts have been made to prove that selection plays an important role in rudimentation processes in cave animals. Efforts mostly focus on the eye and very often pleiotropy is looked upon as being responsible. For example, eye reduction is claimed to antagonistically drive the improvement of taste or the lateral line sense by pleiotropy. However, this could not be confirmed by crossing analysis or by quantitative trait loci mapping. Energy savings have been suggested as another selection factor. This hypothesis implies that all cave species would have to suffer from food limitation. This attempt ignores the fact that the majority of tropical caves, and even some subtropical ones, abound in energy supply. Nonetheless, the traits, having become functionless in the respective cave species occurring in these habitats, regress. Thus, energy limitation is not able to explain regressive evolution of biologically functionless traits in general, or in particular that of the eye in cave species. In fact, independent inheritance of traits suggests that Astyanax cave fish are subjected to mosaic evolution.

Besides, selection variability plays a central role in Darwin’s concept of evolution. Even in the 1930s, the German evolutionary geneticist Curt Kosswig recognized the importance of the variability exhibited by biologically functionless regressive traits for the interpretation of regressive evolution. According to him, in such traits high phenotypic variability arises and is continuously exhibited for a longer time because a biological function no longer exists. He proposed that this variability was due to the absence of stabilizing selection, because regressive mutations are no longer eliminated and traits become reduced over time merely by their accumulation. Thus, variability and loss are correlated. This so-called “Neutral Mutation Theory” is in accordance with Nei’s “Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution” which applies to molecular evolution. However, Darwin’s loss without selection is one of two sides of the same coin, the other being “Darwin’s gain”, in which variability is the basis of constructive evolution. However, usually variability does not exhibit an extent as conspicuous as in the case of functionless cave animal traits. There are only a few examples in which variability, for a relatively short period of time, becomes obvious during evolution. This occurs during the initial phase of processes of adaptive radiation, as can be observed in a series of fish species flocks.

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  1. Centrum für Naturkunde—Zoologisches Museum, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Horst Wilkens & Ulrike Strecker

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  1. Horst Wilkens
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  2. Ulrike Strecker
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Wilkens, H., Strecker, U. (2017). Mechanisms of Regressive Evolution. In: Evolution in the Dark. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54512-6_7

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