Important Idea for Darwin confirmed
Published in 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made a number of bold claims about the nature of evolution – including the suggestion that an animal species with greater diversity in its line will produce more sub-species, too.
Apart from being an important contribution to our understanding of evolution in general, the findings could also be useful in ongoing conservation efforts – helping experts to figure out which species need to be protected in order to ensure their survival.
“My research investigating the relationship between species and the variety of subspecies proves that subspecies play a critical role in long-term evolutionary dynamics and in future evolution of species,” says biological anthropologist Laura van Holstein.
“And they always have, which is what Darwin suspected when he was defining what a species actually was.”
