Ecological dynamics and the basis of sympatric phenotypic diversification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theoretical and empirical studies are showing evidence in support of evolutionary branching and sympatric speciation due to frequency‐dependent competition. However, phenotypic diversification due to underlying genetic diversification is only one possible evolutionary response to disruptive selection. Another potentially general response is phenotypic diversification in the form of phenotypic plasticity. It has been suggested that genetic variation is favored in stable environments, whereas phenotypic plasticity is favored in unstable and fluctuating environments. We investigate the “competition” between the processes of evolutionary branching and the evolution of phenotypic plasticity in a predator‐prey model that allows both processes to occur. In this model, environmental fluctuations can be caused by complicated population dynamics. We found that the evolution of phenotypic plasticity was generally more likely than evolutionary branching when the ecological dynamics exhibited pronounced predator‐prey cycles, whereas the opposite was true when the ecological dynamics was more stable. At intermediate levels of density cycling, trimorphisms with two specialist branches and a phenotypically plastic generalist branch sometimes occurred. Our theoretical results suggest that ecological dynamics and evolutionary dynamics can often be tightly linked and that an explicit consideration of population dynamics may be essential to explain the evolutionary dynamics of diversification in natural populations.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".