Abstract
The concept of evolvability - the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation - has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, but paleontological thinking has tended to neglect recent discussions, because many tools used in the current evolvability literature are challenging to apply to the fossil record. The fundamental difficulty is how to disentangle whether the causes of evolutionary patterns arise from variational properties of traits or lineages rather than being due to selection and ecological success. Despite these obstacles, the fossil record offers unique and growing sources of data that capture evolutionary patterns of sustained duration and significance otherwise inaccessible to evolutionary biologists. Additionally, there exist a variety of strategic possibilities for combining prominent neontological approaches to evolvability with those from paleontology. We illustrate three of these possibilities with quantitative genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, and phylogenetic models of macroevolution. In conclusion, we provide a methodological schema that focuses on the conceptualization, measurement, and testing of hypotheses to motivate and provide guidance for future empirical and theoretical studies of evolvability in the fossil record.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 186-209 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Paleobiology |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 27 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This paper emerged out of a collaboration initiated by our participation in the project “Evolvability: A New and Unifying Concept for Evolutionary Biology?” (2019–2020), which was funded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study (Oslo) in 2019–2020. We are grateful to the project group leaders, T. F. Hansen and C. Pelabon, for their organizational efforts and specific comments on the article. We also thank all the Fellows involved in the project for stimulating discussions on many of the issues treated herein (with special thanks to F. Galis). Three reviewers for the journal provided constructive comments and incisive feedback that helped to improve the final version of the article. We especially appreciate D. Polly's many useful suggestions in this regard.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Paleontological Society.