Ecological speciation! Or the lack thereof?This Perspective is based on the author’s J.C. Stevenson Memorial Lecture delivered at the Canadian Conference for Fisheries Research in Halifax, Nova Scotia, January 2008.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ecological speciation occurs when adaptation to different environments or resources causes the evolution of reproductive isolation. This process is now thought to be very important in the evolution of biological diversity. Indeed, support for ecological speciation is so often asserted in the literature that one can get the impression of ubiquity. Eager to ride on the coattails of this exciting work, my own research has investigated ecological speciation in guppies, sticklebacks, and Darwin’s finches. Much to my initial dismay, I failed to find simple and strong signatures of ecological speciation in the first two of these systems. Setting aside the possibility of personal incompetence, my apparent deviation from ubiquity might simply reflect an existing literature bias. This bias seems obvious in retrospect given that essentially all published studies of ecological speciation purport to be confirmatory, whereas many cases of divergent selection and adaptive divergence are associated with only weak to modest levels of reproductive isolation. In short, different populations can be arrayed along a continuum from panmixia to complete reproductive isolation. Variation along this continuum might profitably be used for studying factors, outlined herein, that can promote or constrain “progress” toward ecological speciation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".