What Invasive Species Reveal about the Rate and Form of Contemporary Phenotypic Change in Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biological invasions are opportunities to gain insight into fundamental evolutionary questions, because reproductive isolation and sudden alterations in selection pressures are likely to lead to rapid evolutionary change. Here I investigate the role played by invasive species in revealing the rate and form of contemporary phenotypic change in wild populations by expanding a database of more than 5,500 rates of phenotypic change from 90 species of plants and animals. Invasive species are frequently used as model organisms and thus contribute disproportionately to available rates of phenotypic change. However, the preponderance of these rates is the consequence of extensive study in a small number of species. I found mixed evidence to support the hypothesis that phenotypic change is associated with time depending on the metric of choice (i.e., darwins or haldanes). Insights from both invasive and native species provide evidence for abrupt phenotypic change and suggest that the environment plays a potentially important role in driving trait change in wild populations, although the environmental influence on the observed trajectories remains unclear. Thus, future work should continue to seek an understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings--both genetic and environmental--of how phenotypic variation allows populations to adapt to rapidly changing global environments.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.002 |
| 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".