Parasitology, Harold W. Manter Laboratory of
Date of this Version
1992
Citation
FROM: Systematics, Historical Ecology, and North American Freshwater Fishes edited by Richard L. Mayden (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Abstract
Modern evolutionary biology is the descendant of two theories proposed by Darwin. First, all organisms are connected by common genealogy, and second, the form and function of organisms is closely tied to the environments in which they live. Of these two theories, the role of the first (phylogeny) in evolutionary explanations has been diminishing in some fields, most notably in ecology and ethology. However, the last ten years have witnessed the beginning of a reversal in this trend. With increasing frequency, ecologists (Wanntorp et aI., 1990; Maurer and Brooks, submitted), ethologists (Dobson, 1985; Huey and Bennett, 1987; Mclennan et aI., 1988), functional morphologists (Lauder, 1982), and other evolutionary biologists (Ridley, 1983; Clutton-Brock and Harvey, 1984; Endler and McLellan, 1988) are accepting the proposition that some innovations that arose in the past have been integrated into the phenotype and function today as constraints on the evolution of other characters.
Comments
Copyright 1992 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.