Robert E. Ricklefs
Department of Biology, University of Missouri – St. Louis, MO, USARobert E. Ricklefs, Curators´ Professor of Biology at the University of Missouriat St. Louis, studies diversity in ecological systems at several levels of organization and several scales of time and space. He has a long-standing interest is the evolutionary diversification of avian life histories, the historical development of ecological communities, and regional species richness. Through these studies, he explores how the factors promoting diversification – such as selection, speciation, and dispersal – are balanced by constraints that limit the response to selection or the coexistence of species. Professor Ricklefs is the author of two textbooks in ecology and over 250 papers in peer-reviewed international journals. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1984) and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993). He has served on the editorial board of many top journals in ecology and evolutionary biology and received the President´s Award (1999) and the Sewall W. Wright Award (2005) of the American Society of Naturalists, among several other honors.
ABSTRACTThe evolution of ecological systems
Ecological systems encompass the interactions of many species with their physical environments and with each other. The environments of ecological systems also have been greatly modified by the activities of organisms. Although these properties are generally understood, their significance in an evolutionary context has been debated for decades. The basic issue concerns integration of the genealogically independent gene pools of the system members. Does selection favor certain system traits, such as productivity and stability, or are these strictly emergent properties resulting from responses to selection on individual species? Some ecologists have advocated superorganismic and community-genetics perspectives, to the point of postulating competition (“survival of the fittest") between ecological systems, but such perspectives should be limited to strictly mutualistic associations.
Clearly, the properties of ecological systems derive primarily from the evolutionary self-interest of their component species. The challenge remains to understand how the evolution of mostly antagonistic interactions shapes the structure and functioning of ecological systems.
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