Layers of contingency shroud pervasive ecological divergence in a local radiation of land snails
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The predictability of evolution depends on the roles that selection and historical contingency play in determining its outcomes, but the relative importance of these evolutionary mechanisms has attracted considerable debate. One view is that historical events have such a profound impact on the genetic structure of populations that patterns of phenotypic evolution are essentially unpredictable. The opposing view is that selection is so powerful that evolutionary change is primarily deterministic, and thus highly predictable. By controlling for the effects of phylogeny, geographic location and habitat, this study examined the relative roles of contingency and determinism in a local radiation of land snails, genus Rhagada, in a continental archipelago. Informed by previous studies on a single island, which revealed a strong association between low-spired shells and rocky habitats, 28 population pairs were sampled in directly adjoining rocky and spinifex plain habitats. When considered in their respective pairs, the effect of habitat was remarkably consistent, with lower-spired shells observed in the rocky habitat in 24 of the comparisons. However, when analyzed outside the context of those pairs, the association was obscured by broad variation in shell shape within habitat types and among lineages. These results reveal the complex nature of a morphological radiation; while the pattern of ecological divergence is highly predictable at the scale that selection acts, deterministic evolution is largely obscured by phylogenetic and population history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".