On speciation in TREE

This coming Wednesday's lab-meeting (November 23), we will discuss two recent speciation-reviews, both published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution during the last year (2011). One is by Maria Servedio et al. and is entitled: "Magic traits in speciation: "magic" but not rare?" and can be downloaded here. The other one is by Roger Butlin and a number of co-authors and is entitled: "What do we need to know about speciation?" and can be downloaded here. The latter paper does also have an online discussion attached to it, where I and several others (including Maria Servedio) commented, and you might also want to check this discussion here, as well as a recent previous post on our blog here, and on the blog of Andrew Hendry and co-workers here.

Note that Hendry's group has written a criticism of Servedio's et al's article, which you can assess through the TREE webpage (unfortunately I do not have the links here, as there is problem with the university server at the moment).

Time and place as usual: "Argumentet" at 13.00 (Wednesday November 23, 2011).

What do we need to know about speciation? Interesting TREE-review and discussion at Cell Press

Some of you might already have seen this, but I wish to draw your attention to an interesting TREE-review entitled "What do we need to know about speciation", published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and authored by Roger Butlin and co-workers in the FroSpecs-network (an ESF-funded research network focussed on speciation research). As you know, FroSpecs funds speciation conferences, meetings and small symposia, including one in Jyväskylä (Finland) next year, and one organized by us after the ISBE-meeting in Lund in August 2012 about behaviour, adaptive and non-adaptive speciation and ecological and non-ecological speciation.

The review by Butlin et al. aims to identify the most important future questions in speciation research in the coming years, and the article is also accompanied by an online discussion, where I was invited to participate, together with several other biologists, including Mike Ritchie, Maria Servedio and Andrew Hendry, to name some of our friends and colleagues. I encourage you to follow both the discussion and read the original article. In terms of speciation discussions, I would also like to recommend an interesting (albeit long!) blog post about "magic traits" on the research blog of Andrew Hendry.