Evolutionary Studies at Vanderbilt

🐒 We are thrilled to announce our Darwin Day 2027 speaker!

On February 17, 2027, Dr. Jenny Tung will be joining us at Vanderbilt for our annual Darwin Day lecture.

Dr. Tung is Director of the Department of Primate Behavior and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a Visiting Professor at Duke University. A MacArthur Fellow and elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, her research explores how social environments shape gene regulation, population genetic structure, and health across the life course — primarily in wild baboons and other social mammals.

Her long-term work with the Amboseli Baboon Research Project in Kenya has produced some of the most compelling evidence we have for how social bonds and social stress get written into biology — with direct implications for understanding human health.
Mark your calendars for February 17, 2027. More details coming soon!

🔬 Ilda McVeigh never planned to be a microbiologist.

She trained as a botanist, earned her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Missouri, and spent years studying plants at Yale and the New York Botanical Garden. It was only when she began working with Paul Burkholder at Yale in the 1940s that she made the pivot — discovering that gut bacteria could produce vitamins in excess of their own needs, opening a new pathway for vitamin production published in PNAS.

She joined Vanderbilt in 1948 and spent the next two decades building a research program that touched antibiotic resistance, fungal pathogens, and microbial nutrition long before those fields became the priorities they are today. Her work on penicillin-resistant strains of bacteria documented both the morphological and metabolic changes that accompanied resistance — foundational observations for a problem that now threatens global public health.

McVeigh became one of only two women in Vanderbilt's biology department to reach the rank of full professor. She was awarded emerita status in 1971 and passed away at 99, leaving behind a legacy of intellectual honesty and scientific integrity that her colleagues never forgot.

See Magazine Page 22:https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/295/2025/03/04154953/ESI-Mag-History-2025-v1.pdf

🐦 Female birds sing and Vanderbilt research is revealing why.

In roughly two thirds of songbird species, females sing. Yet female song has historically been one of the most understudied aspects of songbird biology. Research from Vanderbilt's Creanza Lab, led by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Kate Snyder and published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, is changing that.

By analyzing data from more than 1,000 songbird species, Snyder found a striking bidirectional relationship between cooperative breeding and female song — each one reinforcing the other over evolutionary time. The association was especially pronounced in weakly territorial species, suggesting at least two distinct evolutionary pathways to female song.

It turns out social bonds, not just territorial battles, are a major driver of how birdsong evolves.

See Magazine Page 15:https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/295/2026/05/06122945/ESI-Mag-Spring-2026-v4a.pdf

🦆 Humans have 2 s*x chromosomes. The platypus has 10.

But here is the part that makes evolutionary biologists genuinely excited: those 10 s*x chromosomes form a multivalent chain at male meiosis, adopting an alternating pattern to segregate into # # -bearing and YYYYY-bearing s***m.

190 million years ago, the ancestor of the platypus had a single pair of s*x chromosomes, just like us. Then, during a single reproductive event, the pair accidentally swapped pieces with an ordinary pair of chromosomes. This happened again, making a chain of six, and so on until it reached ten.

And the strangest part? The s*x chromosome at one end of the platypus chain shares genes with the human X chromosome, while genes at the other end are similar to those on the bird Z chromosome — suggesting that mammal and bird s*x chromosome systems, long thought to have evolved completely independently, may actually be linked.

The platypus keeps rewriting what we thought we knew about evolution. 🧬

Read More >> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15502814/

📖 A Vanderbilt professor just published a book that argues evolution is not just a biological phenomenon — it is a design principle being used right now to engineer antennas, develop cancer treatments, and create better adhesives.

Owen Jones, who holds the Glenn M. Weaver Chair in Law, Brain, and Behavior at Vanderbilt and is a founding advisory board member of ESI, has just released Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution's Deepest Logic — and Putting It to Use.

Jones argues that natural selection's logic extends far beyond bird beaks and beetles — into our brains, our behaviors, medicine, engineering, psychology, and the law.

ESI reviewed the book in our Spring 2026 magazine and called the evolutionary medicine chapter "a particular highlight."https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/295/2026/05/06122945/ESI-Mag-Spring-2026-v4a.pdf pages 30-31

Read Jones' column in The Conversation this week: https://theconversation.com/how-natural-selection-helps-design-antennas-cancer-treatments-and-adhesives-281825

See other reviews: https://owendjones.com/reviews

🪲 Dave McCauley spent 35 years at Vanderbilt asking one deceptively simple question: how do populations evolve over time?

He started with beetles. By tracking milkweed beetles across the landscape, McCauley found that small populations frequently go extinct — but new ones form when just a handful of individuals move to new territory. Sometimes as few as one female was enough to start a whole new population. His work showed that both chance and movement play a much bigger role in shaping genetic diversity than anyone had assumed.

Then he switched to plants. His research on Silene vulgaris uncovered something remarkable: the plant's mitochondrial DNA — usually inherited only from the mother — showed extraordinary variation between individuals, with only about half of the genetic content shared between any two plants. Some genes were missing entirely. Others had rearranged. It was far more dynamic than anyone expected.

He then found the same pattern in wild carrots. Mitochondrial DNA, long assumed to be a stable, maternally inherited record, was turning out to be anything but.

McCauley was also, by all accounts, an exceptional mentor. In the words of former student Ed McAssey: "Dave's enthusiasm for research was contagious. He was a great adviser who always made you feel like your experiment was the most interesting part of his day."

See Magazine Page 30:https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/295/2025/03/04154953/ESI-Mag-History-2025-v1.pdf

🦠 What if the math came first — and the biology was just proof?

That is essentially what Vanderbilt PhD candidate William McLaughlin is doing in Megan Behringer's lab. McLaughlin studies how microbial populations transition from stable, predictable states into chaos — and he is using mathematics to predict exactly when and why that happens, then proving it with living bacteria.

"I get to prove the math using biology, when normally it is the other way around," McLaughlin said.

Meanwhile, his labmate Owen Hale has been turning another assumption on its head. Conventional wisdom holds that oxygen drives DNA mutation in bacteria. So bacteria that avoid oxygen entirely should mutate less, right?

Wrong. Hale tracked three species of lactic acid bacteria through more than 1,000 generations in strictly oxygen-free conditions and found surprisingly high mutation rates. The culprit, it turns out, is not oxygen — it is population size. Smaller populations accumulate mutations faster because random genetic drift overpowers natural selection's ability to maintain DNA repair machinery.

Two grad students. Two overturned assumptions. One very productive lab. 🧬

See Magazine Pages 12-14:https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/295/2026/05/06122945/ESI-Mag-Spring-2026-v4a.pdf

🐻 Tardigrades — also known as water bears — are microscopic animals famous for surviving conditions that would kill virtually anything else. Extreme heat, pressure, dehydration, even the vacuum of outer space.

But here is the part that surprised scientists: one species, Ramazzottius varieornatus, produces a unique protein called Dsup — short for Damage Suppressor — that physically binds to DNA and shields it from radiation-induced breaks. It is not just repairing damage after the fact. It is blocking it from happening in the first place.

No other animal is known to do this.

When researchers engineered human cells to produce Dsup, those cells showed roughly 50% fewer radiation-induced DNA breaks than normal cells.

Evolution, as usual, got there millions of years before we did.

Read More >> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70431-1

🧬 Congratulations to our 2026-2027 CoEvoD Fellows!

Claire Cheng joins from the Behringer Lab as an NIH T32 CoEvoD Fellow, where she will investigate how feast-famine cycles drive evolutionary changes in bacterial DNA methylation — with implications for antimicrobial resistance.

Joshua Eis continues in the Castiglione Lab as an NIH T32 CoEvoD Fellow, now in his third year, using machine learning to uncover the molecular secrets behind birds' remarkably long lifespans.

Maria Elbon joins from the Herculano-Houzel Lab as an ESI CoEvoD Fellow, exploring why humans age so differently from other mammals — and what that means for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.

Three fellows. Three labs. One shared mission: understanding how evolution shapes biology from molecules to lifespans.

🌵 Every yucca plant in North America depends entirely on a single group of moths to reproduce. And every yucca moth depends entirely on the yucca to survive.

Vanderbilt's Olle Pellmyr spent years unraveling this extraordinary relationship — and discovered it was even more complicated than anyone thought. Hidden within the mutualism were cheater moths: species that consumed yucca seeds without doing any pollinating, essentially freeloading off a relationship millions of years in the making.

Pellmyr found that yuccas had evolved a countermeasure — selectively aborting flowers with too many moth eggs — keeping the cheaters in check and the mutualism stable.

It is one of the most elegant examples of coevolution ever documented.