An IU biologist received a $1.25 million award to help lead the world’s biggest coordinated project studying evolutionary biology.
The grant to Armin Moczek, a professor in the Department of Biology, and colleagues at IU is part of an $8.7 million award from the John Templeton Foundation, according to an IU press release.
IU’s team will lead three of 22 projects that include almost 50 scientists at eight institutions in the United States, Great Britain and Sweden.
The collaboration marks an international effort to revise the theory of evolutionary biology under a new framework called extended evolutionary synthesis.
The grant was inspired by two articles co-authored by Moczek and other international leaders in the field of evolutionary biology.
The papers, which outline mechanisms that motivate evolutionary changes in organisms over time, explained that the theory of evolutionary biology should expand to include these new mechanisms.
“We’re excited for this opportunity to systematically carry out empirical research related to this new framework,” Moczek said in the release. “This generous support will allow us to test the assumptions and predictions of this unique conceptual framework in a way that cannot be accomplished by a single person or team, but rather requires coordinated effort by diverse researchers across multiple disciplines.”
Scott Gilbert, an expert on evolutionary development at Swarthmore College, said the cooperative effort and research is essential to making progress with this area of study.
“Recent studies, such as those in Armin’s laboratory, have shown that the environment can provide signals that help direct the development of organisms, and that the organisms provide signals that can modify their environment,” Gilbert said in the release. “The question isn’t whether this occurs but rather whether these factors are critical in evolution. To study that, one needs multiple interacting groups of scientists.”
Moczek and his colleague’s framework focuses on the idea that different organisms aren’t programmed by genomes but develop progressively. They assert that living things evolve and thus modify their environments, changing the ecosystem along with themselves.
The framework views how organisms’ develop influences evolution, and allows inheritance to occur through non-genetic means such as symbionts, learning or culture, as well as genetics.
The research does not argue that traditional evolutionary understandings are wrong, but are currently incomplete and must be adapted to gain a fuller understanding of how the evolutionary process occurs.
At IU, Moczek and colleagues will lead three projects. The first will examine the evolutionary significance of developmental plasticity — an organism’s capacity to modify development in response to environmental conditions — in horned beetles.
Moczek has worked with horned beetles in pioneering research in the field.
The second, also led by Moczek, will use horned beetles to explore the role of environment-modifying behaviors, such as constructing nests, and microbial symbionts, such as the gut bacteria that parents pass along to their offspring, on adaptive evolution.
The third, led by Michael Wade, IU distinguished professor in the Department of Biology, in collaboration with Moczek, will develop theoretical models to explore the evolutionary dynamics between various species and their environments. These models will then be put to the test using horned beetles, their bacterial microbiome and symbiotic nematode worms.
The other institutions supported by the foundation grant are Clark University, the Santa Fe Institute and Stanford University in the United States; Cambridge University, the University of Southampton and the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain; and the University of Lund in Sweden.
Research on the project will coincide with the start of support from the grant in September.
Taylor Telford
