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

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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.

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Notes

  1. See Odenbaugh (2007) for a survey of various notions of communities and ecosystems and their roles in various ecological explanations; note that many authors use “community” and “ecosystem” interchangeably.

  2. Dupré endorsed this interpretation in personal communication.

  3. In Bouchard (2013a) I argue that for this reason forward-looking functional theories à la Bigelow and Pargetter are to be favored.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de philosophie, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    Frédéric Bouchard

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  1. Frédéric Bouchard
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Correspondence to Frédéric Bouchard.

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Bouchard, F. Ecosystem Evolution is About Variation and Persistence, not Populations and Reproduction. Biol Theory 9, 382–391 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-014-0171-1

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