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Community-level evolutionary processes: Linking community genetics with replicator-interactor theory

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Nov 16;119(46):e2202538119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2202538119. Epub 2022 Nov 2.

ABSTRACT

Understanding community-level selection using Lewontin’s criteria requires both community-level inheritance and community-level heritability, and in the discipline of community and ecosystem genetics, these are often conflated. While there are existing studies that show the possibility of both, these studies impose community-level inheritance as a product of the experimental design. For this reason, these experiments provide only weak support for the existence of community-level selection in nature. By contrast, treating communities as interactors (in line with Hull’s replicator-interactor framework or Dawkins’s idea of the “extended phenotype”) provides a more plausible and empirically supportable model for the role of ecological communities in the evolutionary process.

PMID:36322791 | DOI:10.1073/pnas.2202538119

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