SFI Omidyar Fellow James O'Dwyer remarks on a paper published this month in PNAS that provides new evidence that diversification in ring species might not be driven by selection.
That notion falls under the umbrella of neutral biodiversity theory, which challenges the popularized view that adaptation is evolution’s great driver.
The new study “offers an alternative hypothesis to adaptation and selection of new species,” said O’Dwyer, but he cautions that computational models that seem to predict real-world patterns aren't always right.
Read the article in Wired (March 28, 2013)
Read the paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (March 11, 2013, subscription required)