{"id":96048,"date":"2019-09-10T17:44:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T00:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/chicken-study-reveals-that-environmental-factors-not-just-chance-could-drive-species-evolution"},"modified":"2019-09-10T17:44:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T00:44:06","slug":"chicken-study-reveals-that-environmental-factors-not-just-chance-could-drive-species-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/chicken-study-reveals-that-environmental-factors-not-just-chance-could-drive-species-evolution","title":{"rendered":"Chicken study reveals that environmental factors, not just chance, could drive species evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/chicken-study-reveals-that-environmental-factors-not-just-chance-could-drive-species-evolution2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the version of evolutionary theory most of us are familiar with, randomly occurring variation in traits, caused by mutations in our DNA, can be fixed in a population through natural selection. However, writing in <i>Epigenetics<\/i> journal, a team of Swedish researchers from Link\u00f6ping University suggests that mutations that can be caused by environmental changes, not just random chance, might be responsible for species diversity.<\/p>\n<p>Until quite recently, it was assumed that DNA <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/mutations\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">mutations<\/a> causing new gene variations occurred more or less randomly. While random mutations do occur, recent research has shown that <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/genes\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">genes<\/a> can be altered by environmental influences too. According to a study published in <i>Epigenetics<\/i> journal, a particular type of mutation, linked to <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/epigenetic+changes\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">epigenetic changes<\/a>, has, over time, led to new animal breeds\u2014and could be responsible for whole new species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the version of evolutionary theory most of us are familiar with, randomly occurring variation in traits, caused by mutations in our DNA, can be fixed in a population through natural selection. However, writing in Epigenetics journal, a team of Swedish researchers from Link\u00f6ping University suggests that mutations that can be caused by environmental changes, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,385,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-evolution","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}