Modelling macroevolutionary patterns: An ecological perspective

Abstract

Complex ecosystems display well-defined macroscopic regularities suggesting that some generic dynamical rules operate at the ecosystem level where the relevance of the single-species features is rather weak. Most evolutionary theory deals with genes/species as the units of selection operating on populations. However, the role of ecological networks andexternal perturbations seems to be at least as important as microevolutionary events basedon natural selection operating at the smallest levels. Here we review some of the recent theoretical approximations to ecosystem evolution basedon network dynamics. It is suggestedthat the evolutionary dynamics of ecological networks underlie fundamental laws of ecology-level dynamics which naturally decouple micro from macroevolutionary dynamics. Using simple models of macroevolution, most of the available statistical information obtained from the fossil recordis remarkably well reproducedandexplained within a new theoretical framework.