TWENTY-TWO KEY ASPECTS TO THE PHYLOGEOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION IN POPULATION GENETICS

¹John C. Avise

¹ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

University of California at Irvine

Irvine, CA., 92697 (USA)

Following its inception in the late 1970s and 1980s, the field of phylogeography has gradually transformed scientific thought and empirical approaches in population genetics and evolutionary biology. No longer must intraspecific evolution be viewed merely as a process of shifting allele frequencies within and among populations; population genetics can now be seen as a genealogical process also, extended through time and expanded across space. No longer must speciation be the line of demarcation below which phylogenetic perspectives have no relevance; instead, intraspecific evolution can now be interpreted as a genealogical coalescent process, and an organismal phylogeny can be seen as composed of multitudinous gene genealogies to which phylogenetic terminologies and concepts (properly adapted) can be applied. No longer must equilibrium scenarios (e.g., between mutation and selection, or between selection and drift) hold primary sway, simply for reasons of mathematical tractability, on population-genetic models; instead, the species-specific historical idiosyncrasies as well as generalities of real-life evolution can now be addressed explicitly. Finally, no longer need microevolutionary biology (including population genetics and ecology) be mostly divorced from macroevolutionary biology (including phylogenetics and systematics); the field of phylogeography now provides a powerful empirical and conceptual bridge between these traditionally separate evolutionary arenas. In this talk, I will justify and review more than 20 major aspects to what can rightly be termed the 'phylogeographic revolution' in population genetics.