BIOC50H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Macroevolution, Speciation, Microevolution
22 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
The concept of species should serve 5 key functions: Above and on species level is called macroevolution. In birds, we usually look at plumage differences. It corresponds to discrete groups of similar organisms: we want our species to represent similar organisms in nature. It helps us understand how discrete clusters of organisms arise in nature (e. g. speciation) It represents the product of evolutionary history: there should be evolutionary process that causes speciation. The concept should apply to all living organisms. Problem: no two of these goals in defining species always coincide with each other; any one given species concept is unlikely to serve all these purposes. The species under a phylogenetically species will be lower because when you study a single locality, there"s not going to be a huge difference in the species. At the local ecological scale, we would define species as the same as the phylogenetically species concept and biologically species concept: more sympatric with each other.
