Competition Across Three Eco-Evolutionary Scales

Competition is a fundamental ecological interaction, accounting for the origination, distribution, and extinction of species. It occurs at the smallest scales yet can also drive larger scale phenomena. It is most often studied at the local scale, either between individuals within a population or between populations.This focus on smaller scale competition can bias the perception of how competition operates at even higher scales. In my dissertation, I analyze competitive dynamics at multiple scales to reveal the unique processes that govern each scale. At the smaller scales, I analyze how individual competitive interactions with regard to resource use can affect population structure. At moderate scales, I analyze how the diversity of competing populations can affect their evolutionary dynamics. At larger scales, I show how the fundamental adaptations of clades competing over the same resource can lead to mutual suppression of diversity and speciation process. Through this, I hope to expose the unique dynamical process of competition at multiple eco-evolutionary scales

Supplementary Data.zip

Data and code from analysis of four eco-evolutionary models</p

Does God roll dice? Neutrality and determinism in evolutionary ecology

A tension between perspectives that emphasize deterministic versus stochastic processes has sparked controversy in ecology since pre-Darwinian times. The most recent manifestation of the contrasting perspectives arose with Hubbell’s proposed “neutral theory”, which hypothesizes a paramount role for stochasticity in ecological community composition. Here we shall refer to the deterministic and the stochastic perspectives as the niche-based and neutral-based research programs, respectively. Our goal is to represent these perspectives in the context of Lakatos’ notion of a scientific research program. We argue that the niche-based program exhibits all the characteristics of a robust, progressive research program, including the ability to deal with disconfirming data by generating new testable predictions within the program. In contrast, the neutral-based program succeeds as a mathematical tool to capture, as epiphenomena, broad-scale patterns of ecological communities but appears to handle disconfirming data by incorporating hypotheses and assumptions from outside the program, specifically, from the niche-based program. We conclude that the neutral research program fits the Lakatosian characterization of a degenerate research program