What is punctuated equilibrium? What is macroevolution? A response to Pennell et al.
نویسندگان
چکیده
What is punctuated equilibrium [or ‘equilibria’ as termed by one of us (N.E.)]? What is macroevolution? These are questions central to evolutionary biology. Yet, recently in an article in Trends Ecol. Evol. by Pennell et al. [1] the former is mischaracterized and the latter is not even defined. Here, we rectify these oversights by providing a definition of macroevolution, an accurate rendition of punctuated equilibrium (PE), and an elucidation of how they must be related. Furthermore, consider the title of [1]: ‘Is there room for punctuated equilibrium. . .?’ Such a question is flawed: concepts do not battle for lebensraum, although sometimes their opponents and proponents seem compelled to.
منابع مشابه
Is there room for punctuated equilibrium in macroevolution?
The long-controversial theory of punctuated equilibrium (PE) asserts that speciation causes rapid evolution against a backdrop of stasis. PE is currently undergoing a resurgence driven by new developments in statistical methods. However, we argue that PE is actually a tangle of four unnecessarily conflated questions: (i) is evolution gradualistic or pulsed? (ii) does trait evolution occur mainl...
متن کاملThe Co-Constitution of Health Systems and Innovation; Comment on “What Health System Challenges Should Responsible Innovation in Health Address? Insights From an International Scoping Review”
Lehoux et al provide a timely and relevant turn on the broad and ongoing discussion around the introduction of health technology and innovation. More specifically, the authors suggest a demand-driven approach to health innovation that starts from identifying challenges and demands at the health system level. In this commentary, I review a number of underlying implications of their study in rela...
متن کاملMistaking the Map for the Territory: What Society Does With Medicine; Comment on “Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine”
Van Dijk et al describe how society’s influence on medicine drives both medicalisation and overdiagnosis, and allege that a major political and ethical concern regarding our increasingly interpreting the world through a biomedical lens is that it serves to individualise and depoliticize social problems. I argue that for medicalisation to serve this purpose, it would have to exclude the possibil...
متن کاملHow Can a Global Social Support System Hope to Achieve Fairer Competiveness?; Comment on “A Global Social Support System: What the International Community Could Learn From the United States’ National Basketball Association”
Ooms et al sets out some good general principles for a global social support system to improve fairer global competitiveness as a result of redistribution. This commentary sets out to summarize some of the conditions that would need to be satisfied for it to level up gradients in inequality through such a social support system, using the National Basketball Association (NBA) example as a point ...
متن کاملNurturing Societal Values in and Through Health Innovations; Comment on “What Health System Challenges Should Responsible Innovation in Health Address?”
Aligning innovation processes in healthcare with health system demands is a societal objective, not always achieved. In line with earlier contributions, Lehoux et al outline priorities for research, public communication, and policy action to achieve this objective. We endorse setting these priorities, while also highlighting a ‘commitment gap’ in collectively addressing system-level challenges....
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- Trends in ecology & evolution
دوره 29 4 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2014