bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/053371; this version posted May 14, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 1 2 3 Range Overlap Drives Chromosome Inversion Fixation in Passerine Birds 4 5 Daniel M. Hooper1,2 6 7 1Commitee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637 8 2 E-mail:
[email protected] 9 10 11 Friday, May 6, 2016 12 13 14 Short title: Chromosomal inversions in passerine birds bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/053371; this version posted May 14, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 2 15 Chromosome inversions evolve frequently but the reasons why remain largely enigmatic. I 16 used cytological descriptions of 410 species of passerine birds (order Passeriformes) to 17 identify pericentric inversion differences between species. Using a new fossil-calibrated 18 phylogeny I examine the phylogenetic, demographic, and genomic context in which these 19 inversions have evolved. The number of inversion differences between closely related 20 species was highly variable yet consistently predicted by a single factor: whether the 21 ranges of species overlapped. This observation holds even when the analysis is restricted 22 to sympatric sister pairs known to hybridize, and which have divergence times estimated 23 similar to allopatric pairs.