James L. Rosindell
Imperial College London
Unifying Ecology and Macroevolution with Individual-Based Theory
[When and where]
A contemporary goal in both ecology and evolutionary biology is to develop theory that transcends the boundary between the two disciplines, in order to understand phenomena that cannot be explained by either field in isolation. This is challenging because macroevolution typically uses lineage-based models whilst ecology often focuses on individual organisms. Here we develop a new parsimonious individual-based theory by adding mild selection to the neutral theory of biodiversity. We show that this model generates realistic phylogenies showing a slowdown in diversification and also improves on the ecological predictions of neutral theory by explaining the occurrence of very common species. Moreover, we find the distribution of individual fitness changes over time, with average fitness increasing at a pace that depends positively on community size. Consequently large communities tend to produce fitter species than smaller communities. These findings have broad implications beyond biodiversity theory, potentially impacting, for example, invasion biology and paleontology.
Invited talk Mini-symposium 4
Updated May 13, 2015, by Minus