Building on our discussion of the Red Queen hypothesis last week, we’re going to go through a theorem which is similarly chess-themed but goes against our hypothesis from episode 20. This theory holds that, rather than continual evolution being necessary for a species to survive, natural selection can sometimes allow genes to be lost from the gene pool.
Sources for this episode: 1) Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Black Queen hypothesis (online) [Accessed 15/01/2021]. 2) Morris, J. J., Lenski, R. E. and Zinser, E. R. (2012), The Black Queen Hypothesis: Evolution of Dependencies through Adaptive Gene Loss. mBio 3(2): e00036-12. 3) Willey, J. M., Sherwood, L. M. and Woolverton, C. J. (2017), Prescott’s Microbiology (Tenth Edition, International Edition). New York: McGraw Hill Education. 4) Allen, R. C., Popat, R., Diggle, S. P. and Brown, S. P. (2014), Targeting virulence: can we make evolution-proof drugs? Nature Reviews Microbiology 12(4): 300- 308.