Bergmann's rule, natural selection and the end of the Panglossian paradigm in ecogeographical analyses

摘要

Geographic patterns of population differentiation have traditionally been at the centre of debate about the relative magnitudes of various evolutionary and ecological mechanisms, especially the association between phenotypic variation, climate and speciation dynamics. This is exemplified by the classical debate between R. A. Fisher, E. B. Ford and S. Wright about the deterministic and stochastic mechanisms structuring phenotypic variation in British populations of the butterfly Panaxia dominula during the 1940s, which, in part, contributed to the establishment of the foundations of ecological genetics (Provine, 1986). More recently, however, the development and increasing use of molecular markers seems to have created a shift of interest in the analysis of population differentiation to a focus on neutral processes of isolation of genetic lineages and their correspondence across multiple taxa, in a phylogeographic context (see Riddle & Hafner, 2004).