ArticleNature2017
Reconciling taxon senescence with the Red Queen's hypothesis.
Article in Nature, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identifying biotic and abiotic roles in marine clade extinction.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- The arms race in bacteria-phage interaction: deciphering bacteria defense and phage anti-defense mechanisms through metagenomics.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Review
- The cultural macroevolution of arcade video games: innovation, collaboration, and collapse.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Evolutionary radiation strategy revealed in the Scarabaeidae with evidence of continuous spatiotemporal morphology and phylogenesis.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution buffered ants against extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- What are patterns of rise and decline?Royal Society open science · 2023Review
- Taxon Cycles in Neotropical Mangroves.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Quantifying the impact of ecological memory on the dynamics of interacting communities.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Dietary niches of creodonts and carnivorans of the late Eocene Cypress Hills Formation.Journal of mammalogy · 2022Article
- Evolutionary drivers, morphological evolution and diversity dynamics of a surviving mammal clade: cainotherioids at the Eocene-Oligocene transition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Linking population-level and microevolutionary processes to understand speciation dynamics at the macroevolutionary scale.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The concerted emergence of well-known spatial and temporal ecological patterns in an evolutionary food web model in space.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Microbiome Transmission During Sexual Intercourse Appears Stochastic and Supports the Red Queen Hypothesis.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Angiosperms versus gymnosperms in the Cretaceous.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- The rise of angiosperms pushed conifers to decline during global cooling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Skeletal marine animal biodiversity is built by families with long macroevolutionary lag times.Nature ecology & evolution · 2020Article
- A 450 million years long latitudinal gradient in age-dependent extinction.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Patterns and drivers of species richness and turnover of neo-endemic and palaeo-endemic vascular plants in a Mediterranean hotspot: the case of Crete, Greece.Journal of biological research (Thessalonike, Greece) · 2019Article
- Climate cooling and clade competition likely drove the decline of lamniform sharks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the fossil record, taxa exhibit a regular pattern of waxing and waning of occupancy, range or diversity between their origin and extinction. This pattern appears to contradict the law of constant extinction, which states that the probability of extinction in a given taxon is independent of that taxon's age. It is nevertheless well established for species, genera and higher taxa of terrestrial mammals, marine invertebrates, marine microorganisms, and recent Hawaiian clades of animals and plants. Here we show that the apparent contradiction between a stochastically constant extinction rate and the seemingly deterministic waxing and waning pattern of taxa disappears when we consider their peak of expansion rather than their final extinction. To a first approximation, we find that biotic drivers of evolution pertain mainly to the peak of taxon expansion, whereas abiotic drivers mainly apply to taxon extinction. The Red Queen's hypothesis, which emphasizes biotic interactions, was originally proposed as an explanation of the law of constant extinction. Much effort has since been devoted to determining how this hypothesis, emphasizing competition for resources, relates to the effects of environmental change. One proposed resolution is that biotic and abiotic processes operate at different scales. By focusing attention on taxon expansion rather than survival, we resolve an apparent contradiction between the seemingly deterministic waxing and waning patterns over time and the randomness of extinction that the Red Queen's hypothesis implies.
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