Place in taxonomy (finish?)

[pierre deleporte]

A 10:28 04/07/2002 +1000, Robert Mesibov wrote :
>here are 3 recent papers to think about:
>
>(1) (...) Aust J Bot 48:753-758, 2000.
>
>(2) (...) a fascinating study of grasshoppers in the genus Chitaura on
>Sulawesi (Biol J Linn Soc 72:373-390, 2001)
>
>(3) A preliminary analysis has recently been made of the connections
>between species range size/position and hypothesised phylogeny (Amer Nat
>155:419-434, 2000). In the groups studied, range size asymmetry was
>associated with relatively recent splits, suggesting that peripatric
>(allopatric) speciation was the split mechanism, and sympatry seems to have
>resulted from post-speciation dispersal. The hint here is that the geometry
>of a set of ranges contains phylogenetic information which would not be
>evident in a simple presence/absence summary of locations.

The same way: a recent issue of Cladistics (18: 112-124) presents a paper
by Green et al., using secondary Brooks parsimony analysis (a classic
phylogeny-based method) to test interpretations of modes of speciation by
Lynch (1989, in "Speciation and its consequences"), based on spatial
distributions of sister-groups (relative size of geographic ranges).
The reanalysis gave the same results in the present case.
A hint that distributional data may effectively inform on speciation processes.

Pierre