Hybridization—long considered a “dead end”—may be key to rapid speciation

Some researchers pursued the idea, researching a transcontinental fly pest of apples:

Many genetic variants tied to the reproductive isolation of species are older than the species themselves. These old variants are often injected into lineages through hybridization with distant relatives.

A recent review in Trends in Ecology & Evolution argues that this phenomenon reveals something fundamental about how new species form. Old variants recast in new roles may sometimes be more important role in the origin of species than new mutations are. And hybridization — long considered an evolutionary dead end — instead acts as a catalyst for combining old gene variants in new ways, fueling rapid diversification.

The evolutionary biologists David Marques and Ole Seehausen at the University of Bern and Joana Meier at the University of Cambridge call this new view of the origin of species combinatorial speciation.

Jonathan Lambert, “New Hybrid Species Remix Old Genes Creatively” at Quanta

Paper. (open access)

Surely, it was long considered a dead end because Darwinism was supposed to account for these changes.

See also: Hybridization boosts evolution in cichlids

and

Another dismissed form of evolution shows at least some viability

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