Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T21:09:00.966Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Evolution of Biodiversity: Richness and Disparity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

James W. Valentine
James W. Valentine*
Affiliation:
Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720
Get access

Extract

The study of biodiversity can be divided into two major aspects. One aspect is concerned with the numbers of species, genera, families or other taxonomic units that are present within a given group of organisms, or a given region, or during a given period of time. This measure of diversity is termed richness. Richness may be represented at any geographic scale: local, such as the number of species in your back yard; regional, such as the number of species found in California; or global, such as the number of species in the entire world at present. Preservation of species richness in the present biosphere is clearly a matter of great social and scientific concern. Each species has a unique genetic makeup, and a distinctive place within an ecosystem. If a species is lost, the unique genes are lost also, and the effects on the ecosystem can be destabilizing, affecting the well-being of still other species.

Type
Mechanisms of Evolution
Information
The Paleontological Society Special Publications , Volume 9: Evolution: Investigating the Evidence , 1999 , pp. 329 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Paleontological Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References Cited

Catmull, J., Hayward, D. C., Mcintyre, N. E., Reece-Hoyes, J. S., Mastro, R., Callaerts, P., Ball, E. E., and Miller, D. J. 1998. Pax-6 origins — implications from the stucture of two coral Pax genes. Development, Genes, and Evolution, 208: 352–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crimes, T. P. 1992. The record of trace fossils across the Proterozoic-Cambrian boundary, p. 177–202. In Lipps, J. H. and Signor, P. W. (eds.), Origin and Early Evolution of the Metazoa. Plenum Press, New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Droser, M., Jensen, S., and Gehling, J. G. 1998. The first grave robbers: Early Cambrian ichnofabric. Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, 30: A233.Google Scholar
Eldredge, N., and Gould, S. J. 1972. Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. p. 82–115. In Schopf, T. J. M. (ed.), Models in Paleobiology. Freeman, Cooper and Company, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Foote, M. 1997. The evolution of morphological diversity. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 28: 129–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzales-Crespo, S., and Levine, M. 1944. Related target enhancers for Dorsal and NF-KB signaling pathways. Science, 264: 255–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keyes, D. N., Lewis, D. L., Selegue, J. E., Pearson, B. J., Goodrich, L. V., Johnson, R. L., Gates, J., Scott, M. P., and Carroll, S. B. 1999. Recruitment of a hedgehog regulatory circuit in butterfly eyespot evolution. Science, 283: 532–534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, E. B. 1978. A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila . Nature, 276: 565–570.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Quiring, R., Waldorf, U., Kloster, U., and Gehring, W. J. 1994. Homology of the eyeless gene of Drosophila to the Small eye gene in mice and Anaridia in humans. Science, 265: 785–789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rutherford, S. L., and Lindquist, S. 1998. Hsp90 as a capacitator for morpholgoical evolution. Nature 396: 336–342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valentine, J. W., Jablonski, D., and Erwin, D. H. 1999. Fossils, molecules and embryos: new perspectives on the Cambrian explosion. Development, 126: 851–859 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wills, M. A., Briggs, D. E. G., and Fortey, R. A. 1994. Disparity as an evolutionary index: a comparison of Cambrian and Recent arthropods. Paleobiology, 20: 93–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar