Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, Idaho, NW, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2019 Apr;22(4):717-725. doi: 10.1111/ele.13231. Epub 2019 Feb 18.
Coevolution has long been thought to drive the exaggeration of traits, promote major evolutionary transitions such as the evolution of sexual reproduction and influence epidemiological dynamics. Despite coevolution's long suspected importance, we have yet to develop a quantitative understanding of its strength and prevalence because we lack generally applicable statistical methods that yield numerical estimates for coevolution's strength and significance in the wild. Here, we develop a novel method that derives maximum likelihood estimates for the strength of direct pairwise coevolution by coupling a well-established coevolutionary model to spatially structured phenotypic data. Applying our method to two well-studied interactions reveals evidence for coevolution in both systems. Broad application of this approach has the potential to further resolve long-standing evolutionary debates such as the role species interactions play in the evolution of sexual reproduction and the organisation of ecological communities.
共进化长期以来被认为是导致特征夸张的原因，促进了主要的进化转变，如有性繁殖的进化，并影响了流行病学动态。尽管共进化的重要性早已被怀疑，但我们还没有发展出对其强度和普遍性的定量理解，因为我们缺乏普遍适用的统计方法来提供野生环境中共进化强度和重要性的数值估计。在这里，我们通过将一个成熟的共进化模型与空间结构的表型数据相结合，开发了一种新的方法，通过这种方法可以得出直接成对共进化的最大似然估计。将我们的方法应用于两个研究充分的相互作用，揭示了这两个系统中都存在共进化的证据。这种方法的广泛应用有可能进一步解决长期存在的进化争论，例如物种相互作用在有性繁殖和生态群落组织的进化中所起的作用。
