Abstract
We characterize a type of functional explanation that addresses why a homologous trait originating deep in the evolutionary history of a group remains widespread and largely unchanged across the group’s lineages. We argue that biologists regularly provide this type of explanation when they attribute conserved functions to phenotypic and genetic traits. The concept of conserved function applies broadly to many biological domains, and we illustrate its importance using examples of molecular sequence alignments at the intersection of evolution and cell biology. We use these examples to show how the study of conserved functions can integrate knowledge of a trait’s causal effects on fitness and its history of natural selection without invoking adaptation. We also show how conserved function provides a novel basis for addressing objections against evolutionary functions raised by Robert Cummins.
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Notes
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This phenomenon is likely to be rare, but hypothetically it could arise by several mechanisms. A genetic locus might never experience a DNA mutation by chance, for example, or a trait might be sufficiently causally overdetermined by the environment or other organismal traits that it is robust to all of the mutations that actually occurred in the clade’s history. Note that these examples are different from lethal mutations that do occur but lead to the organism’s rapid death, so that the mutation is never observed in adults.
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For simplicity we will treat gene families as if they only contained orthologs, i.e. gene copies located in different species that share a common ancestor, and ignore gene duplications that have occurred within a species (paralogs).
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We note, though, that sequence alignment methods do not inherently rely on conserved functions, e.g. in profile-based methods that can detect short functional motifs based on alignments of unrelated proteins with similar biochemical activities (Bairoch and Bucher 1994).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank participants in the Science of Purpose Initiative reading group and Ford Doolittle’s past and present lab members for their insightful feedback and criticism of previous drafts. Our thanks also to the referees for their constructive criticism that substantially improved the paper.
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BS was supported by John Templeton Foundation Grant 62220. JGW was supported by National Science Foundation Grant DBI-2119963.
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Sterner, B., Elliott, S. & Wideman, J.G. An account of conserved functions and how biologists use them to integrate cell and evolutionary biology. Biol Philos 38, 45 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09933-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09933-x