ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
The topology of evolutionary novelty and innovation in macroevolution.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Topological mixing and irreversibility in animal chromosome evolution.Science advances · 2026Article
- The cognitive science of language diversity: achievements and challenges.Cognitive processing · 2025Review
- The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The application of irreversible genomic states to define and trace ancient cell type homologies.EvoDevo · 2025Article
- Innovation in viruses: fitness valley crossing, neutral landscapes, or just duplications?Virus evolution · 2024Article
- Topographically distinct adaptive landscapes for teeth, skeletons, and size explain the adaptive radiation of Carnivora (Mammalia).Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The Macroevolutionary Consequences of Niche Construction in Microbial Metabolism.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Diversification in evolutionary arenas-Assessment and synthesis.Ecology and evolution · 2020Review
- Genomic and phenotypic evolution ofeLife · 2020Article
- Evolution of fossorial locomotion in the transition from tetrapod to snake-like in lizards.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The paradox behind the pattern of rapid adaptive radiation: how can the speciation process sustain itself through an early burst?Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2019Article
- Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Non-adaptive origins of evolutionary innovations increase network complexity in interacting digital organisms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
Sewall Wright's fitness landscape introduced the concept of evolutionary spaces in 1932. George Gaylord Simpson modified this to an adaptive, phenotypic landscape in 1944 and since then evolutionary spaces have played an important role in evolutionary theory through fitness and adaptive landscapes, phenotypic and functional trait spaces, morphospaces and related concepts. Although the topology of such spaces is highly variable, from locally Euclidean to pre-topological, evolutionary change has often been interpreted as a search through a pre-existing space of possibilities, with novelty arising by accessing previously inaccessible or difficult to reach regions of a space. Here I discuss the nature of evolutionary novelty and innovation within the context of evolutionary spaces, and argue that the primacy of search as a conceptual metaphor ignores the generation of new spaces as well as other changes that have played important evolutionary roles.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.
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