Michael Doebeli
University of British Columbia, Canada
Diversification and co-evolution in high-dimensional phenotype spaces
[When and where]
Adaptive dynamics is a general framework to study long-term evolutionary dynamics. It is typically used to study evolutionary scenarios in low-dimensional phenotype spaces, such as the important phenomenon of evolutionary branching (adaptive diversification). I will briefly recall the basic theory of evolutionary branching and review a well-studied empirical example. Because birth and death rates of individuals are likely to be determined by many different phenotypic properties, it is important to consider evolutionary dynamics in high-dimensional phenotype spaces. I will describe some results about evolutionary branching in high-dimensional phenotype spaces, as well as results about the existence of non-equilibrium evolutionary dynamics, such as chaos. Finally, I will present new results about how the nature of the (co-)evolutionary dynamics changes as diversity evolves in high-dimensional phenotype spaces. This leads to some new perspectives on how micro-evolutionary processes can generate macro-evolutionary patterns, such as diversity saturation and punctuated equilibrium.
Keynote
Updated June 27, 2015, by Minus