MINIMALIST MODELS OF MACROEVOLUTION

Palaeobiology is our main source of direct evidence about the history of life. But while that history is fascinating in itself, palaeobiology's most distinctive contribution to evolutionary theory is the insight it provides on the importance of scale. Palaeobiologists see the results of evolutionary processes summed over huge sweeps of space and time. As a consequence of that window on the effects of deep time and vast space, we have a chance to see whether the palaeobiological record enables us to identify evolutionary mechanisms that are invisible to contemporary microevolutionary studies with their local spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales. Palaeobiology, in other words, is the discipline of choice for probing the relationship macroevolutionary patterns and microevolutionary processes.

This chapter will be organised around an important framing idea: that of a “minimalist model” of this relationship. I shall discuss minimalism in detail shortly, but as a rough first approximation, according to minimalism, macroevolutionary patterns are direct reflections of microevolutionary change in local populations; they are reflections of changes of the kind we can observe, measure, and manipulate. For example, Michael Benton (forthcoming) discusses models of global species richness that depend on scaling up in space and time equilibrium models of local ecological communities.