Personal Home Page

Associate Professor;
Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1988

Research and Professional Interests:

I am an evolutionary geneticist, studying variation and adaptation in an ecological context. My favorite questions are Why should animals care who their mates are? Is evolution predictable? What is the relationship between variation and adaptation? What maintains genetic variation?

In my lab, we use Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, as the subject for studies of mutation and variation under natural sexual and artificial selection. These experimental studies are combined with complementary theoretical work to help us understand what we find. We are currently studying the relationship between natural and sexual selection, mutation-selection balance as a force maintaining genetic variation, the evolution of wing shape in the genus Drosophila, evolution of variance-covariance matrices, the detection of evolutionary constraints, and the use of fluctuating asymmetry as an indicator of developmental stability.

Selected Publications:

Abstracts or pdf files of many of these papers are available from the Publications page of my Personal Home Page.

Houle, D. 2000. A simple model of the relationship between developmental stability and fluctuating asymmetry. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 13: 720-730.

Houle, D., and A. S. Kondrashov. 2002. Coevolution of costly mate choice and condition-dependent display of good genes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B Biological Sciences 269: 97-104.

Houle, D, J. Mezey, and Galpern, P. 2002. Interpretation of the results of partial principal components analysis. Evolution 56: 433-440.

Houle, D., and L. Rowe. 2003. Natural selection in a bottle. American Naturalist 161: 50-67.

Houle, D. , J. G. Mezey, P. Galpern, and A. Carter. 2003. Automated measurement of Drosophila wings. BMC Evolutionary Biology 3: 25.

Hansen, T. F., and D. Houle. 2004. Evolvability, stabilizing selection, and the problem of stasis. Pages 130-150 in Phenotypic Integration: Studying the Ecology and Evolution of Complex Phenotypes, edited by M. Pigliucci and K. Preston. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Houle, D. and S. V. Nuzhdin. 2004. Mutation accumulation and the effect of copia insertions in Drosophila melanogaster. Genetical Research 83: 7-18.

Hereford, J., T. F. Hansen, and D. Houle. 2004. Comparing strengths of directional selection: how strong is strong? Evolution 58: 2133-2143.

Mezey, J. G., D. Houle, and S. V. Nuzhdin. In press. Naturally segregating QTL affecting wing shape of Drosophila melanogaster. Genetics. Genetics 2004: doi: 10.1534/genetics.104.036988.

Mezey, J. G., and D. Houle. In press. The dimensionality of genetic variation for wing shape in Drosophila melanogaster. Evolution.

Postdoctoral Associates:

van der Linde, Kim

Graduate Students:

Fierst, Janna L
Griffin, Donald
Hollis, Brian
Schwinn, Stephanie
Tomaiuolo, Maurizio

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