The evolution of evolutionary ecology

Abstract

Appreciation of ecology as a setting or stage for evolution has a long history, but evolutionary ecology became an identifiable discipline in the 1960's, growing mostly out of efforts to understand the evolution of life history components and to formulate a theory of community ecology based on the evolution of species' niches. Since the 1960's, technological advances and conceptual developments, especially the use of null hypotheses and an appreciation of the effects of evolutionary history and Earth history on current patterns, have altered and expanded evolutionary ecology. Many challenging questions remain poorly answered, especially the pressing question of how successful ongoing and future evolution will be in rescuing species from anthropogenic climate change and other human assaults on the natural world.

Keywords:

• biogeography
• ecological communities
• ecological niche
• evolutionary ecology
• evolutionary history
• evolutionary rescue
• extinction
• species interactions

Acknowledgements

I thank Catherine Graham and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on a draft of this paper, and the many graduate students in my evolutionary ecology course who have challenged me to understand the field better than I would have otherwise. I am grateful to Rachel Ben-Shlomo and Uzi Motro for offering me the opportunity to pay tribute to my good friend Uzi Ritte.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Douglas J. Futuyma

Douglas J. Futuyma received his Ph.D. in zoology in 1969 at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and (except for two years on the faculty of that university) has been a professor at Stony Brook University since 1970. His contributions include research on the evolution of interactions between plants and insects, as well as publication of textbooks on evolution. He has been president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.