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Evolutionary & Ecological Hypotheses

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Abstractions about evolutionary and ecological processes such as speciation, reproduction and population structure, along with specific hypotheses explaining traits like floral color change, pollination syndromes and drift in genetic diversity across populations.

21 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

  • Advertising in biology — Advertising in biology means the use of displays by organisms such as animals and plants to signal their presence for some evolutionary reason.
  • Age-area hypothesis — The age-area hypothesis is a concept in cultural anthropology that cultural traits tend to expand outward from their origin with time.
  • Asexual reproduction — Asexual reproduction is a type of reproduction that does not involve the fusion of gametes or change in the number of chromosomes.
  • Drifty Gene Hypothesis — The main thrust of Prentice's argument against the drifty gene idea is that Speakman's critique of the thrifty gene hypothesis ignores the huge impact that famines have on fertility.
  • Effective evolutionary time — Effective evolutionary time is a hypothesis that species diversity accumulates faster where temperature-dependent evolutionary rates are higher and environmental conditions persist longer without major disruption.
  • EICA Hypothesis — It could be, therefore, that the EICA Hypothesis is too narrow in scope, and should be reworded to place an emphasis on an invasive species' ability to reallocate its resources in order to procure a fitness advantage that may or may not involve more vigorous growth and development.
  • Floral color change — Floral color change is a within-flower shift in coloration, commonly associated with floral age or pollination, that can alter how pollinators allocate visits.
  • Heteropatric Speciation — Heteropatric speciation is a special case of sympatric speciation that occurs when different ecotypes or races of the same species geographically coexist but exploit different niches in the same patchy or heterogeneous environment.
  • Kill the Winner hypothesis — The "Kill the Winner" hypothesis (KtW) is an ecological model of population growth involving prokaryotes, viruses and protozoans that links trophic interactions to biogeochemistry.
  • Mosaic evolution — Mosaic evolution (or modular evolution) is the concept, mainly from palaeontology, that evolutionary change takes place in some body parts or systems without simultaneous changes in other parts.
  • Niche microdifferentiation — Niche microdifferentiation is the process a species undergoes to reach genetic diversity within that species; it is the process by which an ecotype is created.
  • Outbreeding — Out-crossing or out-breeding is the technique of crossing between different breeds.
  • Ovulatory shift hypothesis — Thus, the ovulatory shift hypothesis proposes that women possess a dual sexuality, where during the fertile window, a woman should prioritize attracting and choosing a mate with the best genetic quality, or "good genes", since this is the only time she can become pregnant and pass on heritable genetic qualities to her offspring.
  • Pollination syndrome — Pollination syndromes are suites of flower traits that have evolved in response to natural selection imposed by different pollen vectors, which can be abiotic (wind and water) or biotic, such as birds, bees, flies, and so forth through a process called pollinator-mediated selection, a form of selection pressure.
  • Population distribution — Patterns of distribution change depending on the scale at which they are viewed, from the arrangement of individuals within a small family unit, to patterns within a population, or the distribution of the entire species as a whole (range).
  • Population structure (genetics) — For this reason, population structure is a common confounding variable in medical genetics studies, and accounting for and controlling its effect is important in genome wide association studies (GWAS).
  • Psammosere — A psammosere is the sequence of plant succession that has been initiated on sand.
  • Reproductive value (population genetics) — Reproductive value is a concept in demography and population genetics that represents the discounted number of future female children that will be born to a female of a specific age.
  • Sensory drive hypothesis — The sensory drive hypothesis is a hypothesis in population ecology that posits that when local environmental conditions differ between conspecific populations, communication systems will adapt to these conditions.
  • Shadow effect — The shadow effect is a phenomenon seen in genetic studies that use noninvasive genetic data collection methods.
  • Vegetative Reproduction — Vegetative reproduction (also known as vegetative propagation, vegetative multiplication or cloning) is a form of asexual reproduction occurring in plants in which a new plant grows from a fragment or cutting of the parent plant or specialized reproductive structures, which are sometimes called vegetative propagules.