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Neutral Theory: A New, Unified Model for Ecology


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I noticed Stephen Hubbell has come up in some old threads I thought for those who didn't know who he was it would be nice to post a review.

 

Neutral Theory: A New, Unified Model for Ecology by Scott Norris1

 

"In evolutionary time, species come and go. In ecological time—anything from days to decades or even centuries—most species, in most places, persist. They do so in complex networks of local communities and extended metacommunities, within and between which even similar and closely related species may vary greatly in abundance. and while processes such as invasion and succession sometimes bring about a rapid reordering of the biological status quo for a particular site or region, species more typically maintain themselves in fairly constant numbers, neither taking over everything, like kudzu, nor dwindling to nothing, like the dodo.

Empirical data reveal striking and often-repeated patterns in how species originate, persist, assemble in groups, and eventually go extinct. These regularities have always suggested, to some ecologists, the existence of general causal mechanisms that shape both the evolution of biodiversity and the structure of ecological communities. But what are these mechanisms, and how exactly do they work? Such questions are arguably among the most difficult problems receiving serious attention in any branch of science.

Much of the difficulty in formulating any general theories of biological diversity stems from the need to reconcile processes operating at very different spatial and temporal scales: from the evolution and biogeographic distribution of species to the births and deaths of individuals in local communities. Additional troubles arise from uncertainty in the interpretation of empirical patterns: How much is biologically meaningful, how much is the product of random chance, and how does the balance between the two depend on the scale of observation?

These issues lie at the heart of a recent book by ecologist Stephen Hubbell, of the University of Georgia. The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, published in 2001, is one of the most ambitious forays into grand theory that the field of ecology has seen for a long time. Hubbell's neutral theory builds on, and is intended to supplant, one of the field's most influential and enduring theoretical edifices, The Theory of Island Biogeography, by Robert MacArthur and Edward Wilson."

http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/53/2/124.full

 

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