Open AccessBook
Macroevolution, pattern and process
TLDR
In this article, the author argues that only "quantum speciation" (rapid and radically divergent) can explain the story of life revealed in the fossil record; macroevolution, he contends, cannot be attributed to microevolutionary forces such as mutation, genetic drift and natural selection.Abstract:
In this text, the author addresses, from a palaeobiologist's perspective, the question of whether punctuated equilibria - the view, popularized by Stephen Jay Gould among others, that species remain evolutionarily static for long periods of time, with substantial genetic changes and the development of new adaptive strategies occurring only during speciation, or gradualism - the view that large-scale changes result from continual and successive small-scale changes, offers the best account of the history of life. Coming down on the side of those who favour the model of punctuated equilibria, Stanley argues that only "quantum speciation" (rapid and radically divergent), can explain the story of life revealed in the fossil record; macroevolution, he contends, cannot be attributed to microevolutionary forces such as mutation, genetic drift and natural selection. Instead, he posits a series of processes, including species selection, phyletic drift and directed speciation, to accounnt for large-scale patterns.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Microbial biogeography : putting microorganisms on the map
Jennifer B. H. Martiny,Brendan J. M. Bohannan,James H. Brown,Robert K. Colwell,Jed A. Fuhrman,Jessica L. Green,M. Claire Horner-Devine,Matthew D. Kane,Jennifer Adams Krumins,Cheryl R. Kuske,Peter J. Morin,Shahid Naeem,Lise Øvreås,Anna-Louise Reysenbach,Val H. Smith,James T. Staley +15 more
TL;DR: Current evidence confirms that, as proposed by the Baas-Becking hypothesis, 'the environment selects' and is, in part, responsible for spatial variation in microbial diversity, but recent studies also dispute the idea that 'everything is everywhere'.
Posted Content
The Origin of Predictable Behavior
TL;DR: In economics, this critique has been persistently attacked as an acceptable explanation of behavior as discussed by the authors, which has been taken various forms which include information processing limitations in computing optima from known preference or utility information, unreliable probability information about complex environmental contingencies, and the absence of a well-defined set of alternatives or consequences.
PERSPECTIVES Predictions and tests of climate-based hypotheses of broad-scale variation in taxonomic richness
David J. Currie,Gary G. Mittelbach,Howard V. Cornell,Richard Field,Bradford A. Hawkins,Dawn M. Kaufman,Jeremy T. Kerr,Thierry,John Turner +8 more
TL;DR: The authors examined several prominent hypotheses for climate-richness relationships, deriving and testing predictions based on their hypothesized mechanisms, including the more individuals hypothesis, the physiological tolerance hypothesis, and the speciation rate hypothesis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences
David Wilson,Elliott Sober +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization, and makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution.