Adaptive dynamics and evolving biodiversity

By Ulf Dieckmann, Regis Ferriere. 2004

102 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Population viability is determined by the interplay of environmental influences and individual phenotypic traits that shape life histories and behavior. Only a few years ago the common wisdom in evolutionary ecology was that adaptive evolution would optimize a population’s phenotypic state in the sense of maximizing some suitably chosen measure of fitness, such as its intrinsic growth rate r or its basic reproduction ratio R0 (Roff 1992; Stearns 1992). On this basis it was largely expected that life-history evolution would always enhance population viability. In fact, such confidence in the prowess of adaptive evolution goes back as far as Darwin, who suggested “we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed” (Darwin 1859, p. 130) and, in the same vein, “Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each” (Darwin 1859, p. 228). The past decade of research in life-history theory has done away with this conveniently simple relation between population viability and evolution, and provided us with a picture today that is considerably more subtle:

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7bdf8087ead000833190230589303d3596f887d2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. Brian J. Enquist
2. Daniel J. Rankin
3. Hanna Kokko
4. Van M. Savage
5. V. Skirbekk
6. C. Violle
7. Colleen Webb
8. Ulf Dieckmann

In Genetics

1. Michael Doebeli
2. Daniel J. Rankin
3. Ulf Dieckmann
4. Hanna Kokko
5. V. Skirbekk
6. Brian J. Enquist
7. Van M. Savage
8. C. Violle

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Michael Doebeli
2. Ulf Dieckmann
3. Daniel J. Rankin
4. V. Skirbekk
5. Van M. Savage
6. C. Violle
7. Brian J. Enquist
8. Colleen Webb

Citations in the corpus

• Can adaptation lead to extinction (2005, background): “If population size declines gradually with the magnitude of the evolving trait, other selective forces will have the opportunity to be exerted, rescuing the population (Dieckmann and Ferrière 2004), and suicide can only become possible under stochasticity.”
• Lonely hearts or sex in the city? Density-dependent effects in mating systems (2006, background): “These genes could spread no matter how low the population density, resulting in evolutionary suicide (Dieckmann & Ferrière 2004).”
• Fertility trends by social status (2008, background): “When attaining status is likely to decrease long-term reproductive success, biologists may describe status-seeking as evolutionary " maladaptive " (Dieckmann and Ferrière 2004, Falster and Westoby 2003).”
• Scaling from Traits to Ecosystems: Developing a General Trait Driver Theory via Integrating Trait-Based and Metabolic Scaling Theories (2015, background): “…and frequency and density-dependent effects on performance and fitness, the performance (and fitness) associated with the new optimum value likely differs from the fitness and growth rate in the previous environment (Antonovics, 1976; Dieckmann and Ferrière, 2004; Ferriere and Legendre, 2013).”
• Adaptive Speciation: Epilogue (2004, background): “3) and even by actively driving it to extinction (Matsuda and Abrams 1994a, 1994b; Ferrière 2000; Dercole et al. 2002; Gyllenberg et al. 2002; Dieckmann and Ferrière 2004).”