Molecular studies reveal highly ordered geographic patterns in plant and animal distributions. The tropics illustrate these patterns of community immobilism leading to allopatric differentiation, as well as other patterns of mobilism, range expansion, and overlap of taxa. Integrating Earth history and biogeography, Molecular Panbiogeography of the Tropics is an alternative view of distributional history in which groups are older than suggested by fossils and fossil-calibrated molecular clocks. The author discusses possible causes for the endemism of high-level taxa in tropical America and Madagascar, and overlapping clades in South America, Africa, and Asia. The book concludes with a critique of adaptation by selection, founded on biogeography and recent work in genetics.
Molecular Panbiogeography of the Tropics
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Reviews
“[Heads’s] writing guides the reader to crisp understanding entirely worthy of the past, and of a growing presence, and on into the future. How does he accomplish this marvel. . . . [This book] should be widely read, especially by students and journal editors!”—Systematic Biology
“This book is a very interesting contribution to evolutionary biogeography, which should be read by those devotees of panbiogeography, but also by those who criticize it.”—Qtly Review Of Biology
“[An] important book and subject.”—Brenden S. Holland, Pacific Biosciences Research Center, University of Hawaii Frontiers Of Biogeography
“[A] marvel. . . . Heads succeeds in ?tting [many] attractive subjects into a coherent and even compelling whole. His writing guides the reader to crisp understanding entirely worthy of the past, and of a growing presence and on into the future. . . . The language of the book is clear and concise. It should be widely read.”—Gareth Nelson Systematic Biology
"I cannot do better than to sum up Heads’ book with the words Darwin used to praise Wallace’s work on geographical distribution in 1876. This is a ‘. . . grand and memorable work, which will last for years as the foundation of all future treatises’."—Peter J. James Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
"An engaging attempt to simultaneously retain the best of several traditionally different approaches in historical biogeography, incorporating concepts and data from each into a new perspective on Croizat’s vision of Earth and life evolving together."--Brett R. Riddle, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Evolution in Space
Chapter 2. Evolution in Time
Chapter 3. Evolution and Biogeography of Primates: A New Model Based on Molecular Phylogenetics, Vicariance and Plate Tectonics
Chapter 4. Biogeography of New World Monkeys
Chapter 5. Primates in Africa and Asia
Chapter 6. Biogeography of the Central Pacific: Endemism, Vicariance and Plate Tectonics
Chapter 7. Biogeography of the Hawaiian Islands: The Global Context
Chapter 8. Distribution Within the Hawaiian Islands
Chapter 9. Biogeography of Pantropical and Global Groups
Chapter 10. Evolution in Space, Time, and Form: Beyond Centers of Origin, Dispersal, and Adaptation
Glossary
Bibliography