Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T17:33:33.614Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Trends, tools, and terminology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2016

Daniel W. McShea
Daniel W. McShea*
Affiliation:
Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90325, Durham, North Carolina 27708. E-mail: dmcshea@duke.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It has been said that most scientists would rather use another scientist's toothbrush than his terminology. In this issue's Matters of the Record, John Alroy suggests certain conceptual and methodological changes for the study of mechanisms, or dynamics, of large-scale trends, and also a revision of current trend-mechanism terminology. On the conceptual and methodological matters, Alroy's suggestions are good ones (with one important exception), and here I applaud them and explain further why they ought to be taken seriously. Predictably, however, I do not endorse (some of) his terminological revisions.

Type
Matters of the Record
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , Summer 2000 , pp. 330 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Literature Cited

Alroy, J. 1998. Cope's rule and the dynamics of body mass evolution in North American fossil mammals. Science 280:731–734.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cunningham, C. W., Omland, K. E., and Oakley, T. H. 1998. Reconstructing ancestral character states: a critical reappraisal. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 13:361–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, D. C. 1986. Progress in organismal design. Pp. 99–117in Raup, D. M. and Jablonski, D., eds. Patterns and processes in the history of life. Springer, Berlin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foote, M. 1992. Paleozoic record of morphological diversity in blastozoan echinoderms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 89:7325–7329.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foote, M. 1996. Evolutionary patterns in the fossil record. Evolution 50:1–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gould, S. J. 1988. Trends as changes in variance: a new slant on progress and directionality in evolution. Journal of Paleontology 62:319–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, S. J. 1997. Full house: the spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin. Harmony Books, New York.Google Scholar
Maurer, B. A. 1999. Untangling ecological complexity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
McKinney, M. L. 1990. Classifying and analyzing evolutionary trends. Pp. 28–58in MacNamara, K. J., ed. Evolutionary trends. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.Google Scholar
McShea, D. W. 1994. Mechanisms of large-scale evolutionary trends. Evolution 48:1747–1763.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McShea, D. W. 1998. Dynamics of diversification in state space. Pp. 91–108in McKinney, M. L. and Drake, J. A., eds. Biodiversity dynamics: turnover of populations, taxa, and communities. Columbia University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Salthe, S. N. 1985. Evolving hierarchical systems. Columbia University Press, New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunders, W. B., Work, D. M., and Nikolaeva, S. V. 1999. Evolution of complexity in Paleozoic ammonite sutures. Science 286:760–763.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanley, S. M. 1973. An explanation for Cope's rule. Evolution 27:1–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wagner, P. J. 1996. Contrasting the underlying patterns of active trends in morphologic evolution. Evolution 50:990–1007.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed