NDLI: Ecosystem Evolution is About Variation and Persistence, not Populations and Reproduction

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Bouchard, Frédéric
Copyright Year	2014
Abstract	Building upon a non-standard understanding of evolutionary process focusing on variation and persistence, I will argue that communities and ecosystems can evolve by natural selection as emergent individuals. Evolutionary biology has relied ever increasingly on the modeling of population dynamics. Most have taken for granted that we all agree on what is a population. Recent work has reexamined this perceived consensus. I will argue that there are good reasons to restrict the term “population” to collections of monophyletically related replicators and interactors, which explains why many existing models in population biology exclude by definition many genuine evolving biological individuals such as communities and ecosystems. By studying a case of community evolution (a symbiotic termite–fungus community), we will see that it is variation that is important to evolutionary processes, not populations. Variation within a population is only one of many types of variation that can lead to evolution by natural selection. The upshot of focusing on variation is that cases of community and ecosystem adaptive change become tractable in evolutionary terms. I will show that complex emergent individuals such as communities and ecosystems cannot be fully accommodated by conventional population/reproduction models but can be accommodated by variation/persistence models.
Starting Page	382
Ending Page	391
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISSN	15555542
Journal	Biological Theory
Volume Number	9
Issue Number	4
e-ISSN	15555550
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2014-04-25
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Persistence Philosophy of Biology Ecosystem Philosophy of biology Biological individuality Evolution Evolutionary Biology Cognitive Psychology Community Fitness
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics History and Philosophy of Science

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
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