The task of linking evolution with ecology is largely a question of appreciating the significance of a range of time-scales. Darwin (1859) effectively decoupled them by placing ecology as the process that controlled the evolution, and the two disciplines have not recovered. This chapter aims to redress the balance. Relevant processes are active at all time-scales. None is more important than any other, and all must be incorporated into any synthesis of the organization of life.

Biological responses

Species clearly respond to global climatic oscillations on Milankovitch time-scales by distribution change, evolution, and extinction. The evidence discussed in Chapters 5–7 indicates that distribution change is much the most frequent response, associated with local extinction. Evolutionary change in any form is rare, but examples are known, and these may be interpreted as gradualistic, punctuated, or equivocal, but given the overall low frequency of any evolutionary response, it must be concluded that, for most species, most of the time, stasis is the rule through climatic oscillations of Milankovitch time-scales (see also Williams 1992).

Post-modern evolutionary synthesis

The record of environmental change during the Quaternary is undoubtedly of great interest for the history of modern communities, and also for the evolution of a proportion (as yet unknown) of modern taxa. This history assumes a greater significance, however, if it can be read as a model for the way taxa have responded to climatic changes of Milankovitch time-scales throughout Earth history. We need to think of the record of the Quaternary as the expression of dynamism at time-scales of 104–105 years, and not as history.