Testing punctuated equilibrium theory using evolutionary activity statistics

Abstract

ThePunctuatedEquilibriumhypothesis (Eldredge and Gould, 1972) asserts thatmost evolutionary change occurs during geologically rapid speciation events, with species exhibiting stasis most of the time. Punctuated Equilibrium is a natural extension of Mayr's theories on peripatric speciation via the founder effect,(Mayr, 1963; Eldredge and Gould, 1972) which associates changes in diversity to a population bottleneck. That is, while the formation of a foundation bottleneck brings an initial loss of genetic variation, itmay subsequently result in the emergence of a child species distinctly different from its parent species. In this paper we adapt Bedau's evolutionary activity statistics (Bedau and Packard, 1991) to test these effects in anALife simulation of speciation.We find a relative increase in evolutionary activity during speciations events, indicating that punctuation is occurring. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.