Thinking in continua: beyond the “adaptive radiation” metaphor
Thinking in continua: beyond the “adaptive radiation” metaphor
复制标题
连续思维：超越“自适应辐射”隐喻
作者：
M. Olson;Alfonso Arroyo
“适应性辐射”是爆炸性进化分歧的一个令人回味的隐喻，100多年来，它给了无数科学家一个强大的启发，在所有系统发育水平上研究所有类型的生物。然而，成功的代价是使“适应性辐射”变得如此模糊，以至于它不再能反映强大的基于系统发育的新技术所产生的详细结果，这些技术量化了连续的适应性辐射变量，如物种形成率，系统发育树形状和形态多样性。试图将这些技术的结果硬塞进明确的“自适应辐射：是/否”方案导致了具体化，其中任意的定量阈值被视为真实的。我们对科学中隐喻生命周期的描述表明，现在是时候用新概念来代替旧隐喻了，这些新概念可以更好地代表所有生命的多样性、差异和物种形成率。
“Adaptive radiation” is an evocative metaphor for explosive evolutionary divergence, which for over 100 years has given a powerful heuristic to countless scientists working on all types of organisms at all phylogenetic levels. However, success has come at the price of making “adaptive radiation” so vague that it can no longer reflect the detailed results yielded by powerful new phylogeny‐based techniques that quantify continuous adaptive radiation variables such as speciation rate, phylogenetic tree shape, and morphological diversity. Attempts to shoehorn the results of these techniques into categorical “adaptive radiation: yes/no” schemes lead to reification, in which arbitrary quantitative thresholds are regarded as real. Our account of the life cycle of metaphors in science suggests that it is time to exchange the spent metaphor for new concepts that better represent the full range of diversity, disparity, and speciation rate across all of life.