What does community phylogenetics owe to Darwin?

 
Miguel Verdú

CIDE-CSIC, Valencia, España

 The two main processes that have been traditionally considered to structure ecological communities are competition and habitat filtering. With the increasing availability of phylogenetic information there has been a revival of interest in understanding local community assembly processes. At the core of community phylogenetics is the principle that related species are ecologically similar and therefore tend to compete more. This rationale was anticipated by Darwin under a clear phylogenetic framework depicted in the unique illustration of the Origin of Species. In addition to the relatedness-competition hypothesis, Darwin also anticipated most of the recent discoveries that modern comparative methods and community phylogenetics are doing. For example, Darwin explained why a trait is expected to be evolutionarily conserved (i.e. phylogenetic signal), how cladogenesis is heritable and may produce a clustered morphospace, how ecological interactions are assembled into complex networks in which coextinctions may be produced,  how limiting similarity may be produced by trait divergence or by competitive exclusion, etc. Here, I will review the main findings of community phylogenetics tracing back their origins to Darwin.

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