ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Evolutionary norm-breaking and extinction in the marine tropics.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Uniqueness and predictability in evolution and the history of mollusks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The end-Cretaceous mass extinction restructured functional diversity but failed to configure the modern marine biota.Science advances · 2025Article
- QnAs with Geerat J. Vermeij.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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Abstract
Evolutionary innovations, defined as character states that transcend clade norms, are often studied in an exclusively phylogenetic context, but their distribution in time and space indicates that geography also influences the evolution of new ecological, morphological, and physiological traits. In an analysis of 99 fossillzable, norm-breaking innovations in tropical marine Neogene molluscan clades that arose uniquely in either (but not in both) the Indo-West Pacific (IWP) or Atlantic-East Pacific (AEP) realms, I show that there are far more innovations in the IWP (79%) than those in the AEP (21%). Most of the innovations are interpretable as defensive or competitive adaptations or as indicators of extreme habitat specialization. Although the innovations arose in taxonomically rich biotas, only 9% are associated with subclades comprising 10 or more species each, indicating that they contributed little to overall taxonomic richness. Compilations of extant species in 30 pantropical molluscan clades show that the IWP accounts for 71% of tropical shallow-water species, implying that the per-species incidence of norm-breaking innovations is higher there than in the AEP. Only 5% of innovations became extinct in the IWP as compared with 38% in the AEP, mirroring a similar difference in the magnitudes of Late Miocene and later taxonomic extinction in the two realms. These data imply that large-scale disruption strongly limits norm-breaking innovation. Opportunities for adaptive innovation are therefore likely to be few in today's heavily overexploited and disturbed biosphere.
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