Can phylogenetic methods from evolutionary biology inform us about how societies evolve?

This coming lab-meeting (Wednesday 27 October), I was thinking that we should discuss if and how methods from evolutionary biology can elucidate problems studied by political scientists: the rise and fall of societies. There is an interesting article published in Nature, where the authors used phylogenetic methods to investigate if societies evolved towards more complexity (or not). The study was performed on a set of societies in South-East Asia and in the Pacific.  

Evolutionary biologist and community ecologist Jared Diamond has an interesting perspective about the study. Read both the comment by Diamond and the original article so that we can have an interesting discussion on Wednesday. Time and place as usual: "Darwin" at 10.15. Below is the abstract and title of the original paper:

Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific  

Thomas E. Currie,Simon J. Greenhill, Russell D. Gray, Toshikazu Hasegawa & Ruth Mace 

There is disagreement about whether human political evolution has proceeded through a sequence of incremental increases in complexity, or whether larger, non-sequential increases have occurred. The extent to which societies have decreased in complexity is also unclear. These debates have continued largely in the absence of rigorous, quantitative tests. We evaluated six competing models of political evolution in Austronesian-speaking societies using phylogenetic methods. Here we show that in the best-fitting model political complexity rises and falls in a sequence of small steps. This is closely followed by another model in which increases are sequential but decreases can be either sequential or in bigger drops. The results indicate that large, non-sequential jumps in political complexity have not occurred during the evolutionary history of these societies. This suggests that, despite the numerous contingent pathways of human history, there are regularities in cultural evolution that can be detected using computational phylogenetic methods.

On ecological speciation, tempo and mode of evolution

The coming week's lab-meeting (16 December 2009), will be the last one for 2009. Due to teaching obligations, I would like the meeting to start somewhat later than usual, at 10.30. The topic of this week's lab-meeting will be speciation, and we will discuss two papers published in 2009 in and Nature and Science (abstracts are provided below):

Phylogenies reveal new interpretation of speciation and the Red Queen

Chris Venditti¹, Andrew Meade¹ & Mark Pagel^1,2

(Nature advance online publication)

Evidence for Ecological Speciation and Its Alternative

Schluter Dolph

Science (2009) 323: 737-741

These two papers are interesting, because they reflect radically different views on the causes of speciation and the drivers of speciation processes. I therefore thought it would be interesting to discuss them with this in mind, and contrast their different underlying viewpoints against each other. Who is correct and who is wrong? Or are both correct, and if so, in what domains?

We will thus meet at 10.30 in "Darwin" on Wednesday 16 December. Any fika-volunteer?

Abstracts follow below:

Chris Venditti¹, Andrew Meade¹ & Mark Pagel^1,2

Phylogenies reveal new interpretation of speciation and the Red Queen

The Red Queen¹ describes a view of nature in which species continually evolve but do not become better adapted. It is one of the more distinctive metaphors of evolutionary biology, but no test of its claim that speciation occurs at a constant rate² has ever been made against competing models that can predict virtually identical outcomes, nor has any mechanism been proposed that could cause the constant-rate phenomenon. Here we use 101 phylogenies of animal, plant and fungal taxa to test the constant-rate claim against four competing models. Phylogenetic branch lengths record the amount of time or evolutionary change between successive events of speciation. The models predict the distribution of these lengths by specifying how factors combine to bring about speciation, or by describing how rates of speciation vary throughout a tree. We find that the hypotheses that speciation follows the accumulation of many small events that act either multiplicatively or additively found support in 8% and none of the trees, respectively. A further 8% of trees hinted that the probability of speciation changes according to the amount of divergence from the ancestral species, and 6% suggested speciation rates vary among taxa. By comparison, 78% of the trees fit the simplest model in which new species emerge from single events, each rare but individually sufficient to cause speciation. This model predicts a constant rate of speciation, and provides a new interpretation of the Red Queen: the metaphor of species losing a race against a deteriorating environment is replaced by a view linking speciation to rare stochastic events that cause reproductive isolation. Attempts to understand species-radiations³ or why some groups have more or fewer species should look to the size of the catalogue of potential causes of speciation shared by a group of closely related organisms rather than to how those causes combine.

Schluter Dolph

Natural selection commonly drives the origin of species, as Darwin initially claimed. Mechanisms of speciation by selection fall into two broad categories: ecological and mutation-order. Under ecological speciation, divergence is driven by divergent natural selection between environments, whereas under mutation-order speciation, divergence occurs when different mutations arise and are fixed in separate populations adapting to similar selection pressures. Tests of parallel evolution of reproductive isolation, trait-based assortative mating, and reproductive isolation by active selection have demonstrated that ecological speciation is a common means by which new species arise. Evidence for mutation-order speciation by natural selection is more limited and has been best documented by instances of reproductive isolation resulting from intragenomic conflict. However, we still have not identified all aspects of selection, and identifying the underlying genes for reproductive isolation remains challenging.