Losos Jonathan B, Schoener Thomas W, Spiller David A
Department of Biology, Campus Box 1137, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri 63130, USA.
Nature. 2004 Nov 25;432(7016):505-8. doi: 10.1038/nature03039.
The role of behaviour in evolutionary change has long been debated. On the one hand, behavioural changes may expose individuals to new selective pressures by altering the way that organisms interact with the environment, thus driving evolutionary divergence. Alternatively, behaviour can act to retard evolutionary change: by altering behavioural patterns in the face of new environmental conditions, organisms can minimize exposure to new selective pressures. This constraining influence of behaviour has been put forward as an explanation for evolutionary stasis within lineages and niche conservatism within clades. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that behavioural change prevents natural selection from operating in new environments has never been experimentally tested. We conducted a controlled and replicated experimental study of selection in entirely natural populations; we demonstrate that lizards alter their habitat use in the presence of an introduced predator, but that these behavioural shifts do not prevent patterns of natural selection from changing in experimental populations.
行为在进化变化中的作用长期以来一直存在争议。一方面，行为变化可能通过改变生物体与环境相互作用的方式，使个体面临新的选择压力，从而推动进化分歧。另一方面，行为可以起到阻碍进化变化的作用：面对新的环境条件时，通过改变行为模式，生物体可以尽量减少对新选择压力的暴露。行为的这种限制作用被认为是对谱系内进化停滞和类群内生态位保守性的一种解释。然而，行为变化会阻止自然选择在新环境中起作用这一假设从未经过实验验证。我们对完全自然的种群进行了一项有对照且可重复的选择实验研究；我们证明，蜥蜴在引入捕食者的情况下会改变其栖息地利用方式，但这些行为变化并不会阻止实验种群中自然选择模式的改变。
