EEB Tuesday Seminar Series - Speciation, extinction, and the ecology of macroevolution

Description: The causes of biodiversity patterns at the largest scales of time and space remain poorly understood. In this talk, I examine the relationship between these dynamic patterns of biological diversity and rates of evolutionary diversification, and I evaluate progress in linking microevolutionary processes to speciation and extinction at macroevolutionary scales. I argue that biodiversity dynamics across space, time, and clades reflect an underlying causal unity shaped by ecological modulation of diversification. However, further progress will require much deeper integration of traditional microevolutionary biology with population ecology and paleobiology.