Yesterday during lunch I watched a very interesting talk by Gavin Thomas (link here). The photo below is of Gavin talking about my 2008 Systematic Biology paper with Luke Harmon and Dave Collar. (I promise that this is just a minor point in his talk - but I couldn't resist.)
Other talks in the symposium include seminars by Luke Harmon, Andy Purvis, Ally Phillimore, and others.
Gavin's competitive-exclusion model of trait evolution is kind of neat (O'Meara mentioned something similar in his phyloseminar; another PCM zeitgeist, I guess) but perhaps too simple. OU1 and BM are pretty simple, but I doubt any univariate study would show strong support for this model over other candidates. From what I've seen, closely-related lineages minimize competition by diverging across multiple ecological axes, without fully diverging across any single trait or ordination axis. To pick up these sorts of competitive dynamics, it would seem that a multidimensional view of traitspace would probably be necessary.
ReplyDelete-Dave