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• W2000569043 abstract "Biographers of the great and the good generally focus their attention on the events that shaped the life of the person they are writing about, interpreting the actions of their subjects in the light of the formative events and influences upon them. So, too, in science, historians and philosophers of science recognize that science is socially constructed and progresses (if we are allowed to assume that) through turns and counter-turns, through research programmes and paradigms that struggle with one another for ascendancy. To make proper sense of the contemporary knowledge-base and theoretical structure of any scientific discipline it is therefore important that students (of all career stages) spend a little time delving back into the past, examining the pathways their subjects have followed. In biogeography, such an effort can be rewarding – there are many colourful characters in the development of the subject over the last 100 years or so – but can also at times be bewildering and confusing. As the former editor of this journal, Philip Stott, observed to me on more than one occasion, biogeography has always been a strongly contested discipline. The three essays that follow this editorial provide rich illustration of this fact but are also, I believe, richly illuminating. As Briggs (2009) observes, many consider Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species the most important scientific book ever written, with impacts extending far beyond the bounds of the natural sciences. Unsurprisingly, the 150th anniversary of its publication has generated renewed interest and attention on Darwin’s ideas as set out in the Origin, in the form of scientific papers and meetings and (in the UK at least) numerous documentaries and articles in the popular media. Towards the end of 2008, in advance of the anniversary, I felt that it would be rewarding to commission for this journal a set of essays focused on the legacy of the Origin for biogeography. Each of the contributions has been written independently of the other so as to provide a set of contrasting personal perspectives and arguments, rather than an exchange in which each author responds directly to the others. However, readers may find that tackling them in the sequence that follows does present an orderly exchange of contrasting viewpoints with an integrative summation in the final article. The first of these Guest Editorials, by Jack Briggs (2009), provides a beautifully written account of the development of Darwin’s thinking leading up to the Origin, focused on the crucial significance of the study of distribution, and illustrating along the way that experimentation in evolutionary ecology did not begin some time in the latter half of the twentieth century, as one might mistakenly suppose from some recent literature, but was already underway in the 19th century. In his essay Briggs focuses especially on the significance to Darwinian biogeography of centres of origin and dispersal, a theme on which Briggs has made a distinguished contribution over his lengthy career in biogeography. In counterpoint to this ‘dispersalist’ emphasis, Briggs describes the rise of vicarianism as in essence a failed rebellion that has lost momentum as ‘…an overwhelming number of studies…’ several of which he cites in his essay ‘…reiterated the importance of centres of origin and long-distance dispersal’. In the second article of the set, Michael Heads (2009) in his lucid Guest Editorial, argues from the binary opposite perspective (sensuCrisci & Katinas, 2009), claiming that the concept of centres of origin has been inextricably intertwined with teleological views of evolution and biogeography. He argues that Charles Darwin himself moved away from this worldview as he revised the Origin in later editions but that his change of view has been suppressed in modern biology by the dominance of the (‘teleological’) modern synthesis. Heads has a point when he argues that the language of biology often takes a teleological form and that teleology is not valid in science, but the challenge for the reader remains as to whether the association Heads draws between teleology and centres of origin – under the ruling framework of the modern evolutionary synthesis – is a convincing theory of the development of biogeographical thinking. While it is not the only point of disagreement between the views of Briggs and Heads, it is striking how both seize upon new discoveries in molecular biology as providing crucial evidence to swing the case in favour, on the one hand, of the significance of centres of origin and dispersal and, on the other hand, of vicariance. It is difficult for those of us who are not molecular biologists to pass judgement on the validity of molecular clocks and phylogenies but as Heads (2009) argues, they are best calibrated ‘…with reference to the distribution of molecular clades and associated tectonics’. Here it is instructive to return to one of Darwin’s key starting points, the lessons to be learnt from the study of oceanic island biotas, in which we now have enough (geologically) well-constrained molecular phylogenies to be confident that the progression rule is indeed a common pattern in the evolutionary biogeography of remote oceanic island archipelagos. This pattern, in which basal members occur on older islands, and the predominant pattern of colonization is from older to younger islands, is shown in many archipelagic radiations of neo-endemic species in settings where the majority of the islands concerned have never been connected together by land connections (Wagner & Funk, 1995; Whittaker & Fernández-Palacios, 2007; Whittaker et al., 2008; Givnish et al., 2009). While it is abundantly clear that vicariance events occur repeatedly in the natural world and are profoundly important in biogeography, it is a challenge to square such evidence as this with an exclusively vicariance-centric worldview. The challenge of how to accommodate the differing perspectives essayed by Briggs (2009) and Heads (2009) is addressed in the third Guest Editorial, by Jorge Crisci and Liliana Katinas (Crisci & Katinas, 2009). Their analysis uses the framework of binary opposites to describe three interrelated sets of explanatory hypotheses for the distribution of organisms, focused on (1) the information content of the spatial distribution of evolution, (2) vicariance versus dispersal, and (3) history versus ecology. The binary opposites metaphor appears a particularly relevant description of the struggles evident in historical biogeography over the past half century, and from a reading of the three essays it becomes clear to the ecological biogeographer reader (such as myself) that a central problem in historical biogeography has hitherto been the strength of the connection between choice of method on the one hand and philosophical approach and worldview on the other. Their conclusions that (1) the analysis of the distribution of organisms is a valid historical biogeographical enterprise in its own right, (2) dispersal and vicariance both have importance, and (3) integration of historical and ecological approaches to biogeography within a conservation biogeographical setting is a worthy goal that would place the subject to a greater degree at the service of society (cf. Whittaker et al., 2005), are surely to be welcomed by the readers of this journal. While it is evident from recent submissions to this journal that the methodological debates in historical biogeography are far from settled (e.g. Garzón-Orduña et al., 2008), it does appear that we now have appropriate tools at our disposal that allow the teasing apart of the relative contribution of different processes (e.g. dispersal versus vicariance, extinction versus speciation) (e.g. Katinas & Crisci, 2008; Russell et al., 2008; Andrus et al., 2009; Keppel et al., 2009; Mansion et al., 2009) and that we can claim to have made some progress since the publication of the Origin in describing and understanding the ‘laws of distribution’ that so interested and intrigued Charles Darwin." @default.
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• W2000569043 date "2009-06-01" @default.
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• W2000569043 title "Darwin and biogeography" @default.
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