Many different ways of analyzingspatialvariation in biological diversity—the biogeographic patterns—have been employed by different authors, and some of the assumptions in these methods are discussed here. Thechronologicalaspect of evolution is discussed in the next chapter.

Every kind of plant or animal has its own particular distribution and ecology, and this was already well understood in ancient times. Yet portraying a distribution is not straightforward. New collections are always being made and ideas on the delimitation of taxonomic groups change. Outline maps are generalized simplifications only but are useful for comparative purposes. Although dot maps...

Differentiation in morphology and molecules occurs over space and through time. Spatial variation can be observed directly; establishing the age of a clade is more difficult. Molecular clock dates for clades are reported in the mass media and even the scientific literature as more or less factual, yet in reality there are fundamental problems transforming sequence data—aspects of structure orform—into dates, which vary along thetimeaxis. Modern molecular clock dates give an overall chronology of evolution in which many large taxa, such as plant families and mammal orders, only develop in the Cenozoic. This same chronology...

The last two chapters considered general aspects of evolution in space and time. The rest of the book is a study of biogeography and tectonics in the tropical regions. The tropics are well known for their stupendous biodiversity, and a survey of all groups is obviously impossible. On the other hand, discussions that are not based on concrete examples often become theoretical and unrealistic. As a compromise, the members of a single clade, the primates, were selected as the focus of a case study of tropical America, Africa, and Asia. The primates are suitable for this because they are diverse,...

Detailed information on the molecular phylogeny of New World monkeys (Opazo et al., 2006; Osterholz et al., 2009) and on their distribution and ecology (IUCN, 2009) is now available, and so the group is an excellent subject for biogeographic and evolutionary study. Researchers now agree on many descriptive aspects of the phylogeny and distributions, although the interpretation of the data remains controversial. As yet, there is little agreement on how, when, or where the different primate clades evolved in America or even how primates came to be there in the first place. Most previous work has suggested that primates colonized...

Several decades of work on the molecular biology of primates, together with extensive field studies by biologists, paleontologists, and conservation ecologists, mean that a great deal is now known about the phylogeny and distribution of the order. Nevertheless, the interpretation of this data and proposals about how, where, and when the different groups developed remain controversial. This chapter develops a new model of primate evolution in the Old World by integrating the distributions of the molecular clades with plate tectonics.

Primates are widespread in the tropics, but apart from humans and one introduced species in New Guinea, they are absent...

East of the Philippines and Sulawesi there is abundant suitable habitat for non-human primates in the tropical rainforests of New Guinea and the Pacific islands. Despite this, they are absent (apart from an introducedMacacain northwestern New Guinea), and the account of Pacific biogeography given in this chapter and the next two will rely instead on data from a range of other groups.

The islands of the Pacific, along with their plants and animals, provide the classic case of an island system, and the taxa are often cited as they seem to provide such remarkable evidence for the powers...

The Hawaiian Islands have one of the most distinctive biotas of all the Pacific islands, and they have been the subject of many in-depth studies. Most authors now interpret the flora and fauna as classic cases of longdistance dispersal. For these reasons the biogeography of the group is discussed here in more detail.

As explained in Chapter 6, the most influential theory of island biogeography, MacArthur and Wilson’s (1967) equilibrium model, applied Matthew’s (1915) center of origin concepts to island taxa. Thus Wilson (2001b: 56) described the process whereby “The Hawaiian Islands are colonized by birds, crickets, wasps, damselflies, beetles,...

The plants and animals of the Hawaiian Islands survive in a landscape that has been dominated, at least at some stage in the past, by volcanism. The geology of the islands is summarized below before looking in more detail at distribution in the archipelago.

The Hawaiian Islands form a chain with the youngest island in the southeast and the oldest in the northwest. Although the archipelago comprises one chain of islands, it has been formed by two parallel chains of volcanoes, termed the Loa and Kea trends, that show geochemical and isotopic differences (Fig. 8-1; Tanaka et al., 2008). These...

Many groups show biogeographic connections between the central Pacific and tropical America. Examples includeFitchiaand its allies (Fig. 6-15), the tribe Sicyeae in Cucurbitaceae (Fig. 6-16), and others (Figs. 7-3 to 7-6). These groups link the Pacific with western parts of the Americas and the Caribbean plate, terranes that formed in the Pacific and were later translated eastward. The Pacific–western American clades often have their sister groups in eastern parts of the Americas, and this break can be seen in Mexico and Colombia, as discussed next.

In the ducks mapped in Fig. 1-9, western Mexico and other western...

This book has dealt at some length with ideas on the center of origin and dispersal. The third component of the CODA model is adaptation by natural selection. Some current views of geneticists on this are discussed below, but first several conclusions reached in earlier chapters are summarized.

Many of the studies cited in earlier chapters indicate that phylogenetic and geographic breaks in the distributions of plants and animals correspond with tectonic features. This spatial patterning is compatible with a history in which Earth and life have evolved together. This in turn suggests that standard models of the time scale...