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(NAS Colloquium) The Future of Evolution (2002) / Chapter Skim
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The Biotic Crisis and the Future of Evolution
Pages 1-4

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From page 1...
... It is unlikely that speciation will be evenly distributed among surviving lineages; it may be concentrated among particular clades or This introductory paper was presented at the National Acaclemy of Sciences colloquium, "The Future of Evolution," held March 16-20, 2000, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, CA. tTo whom reprint requests should be addressed.
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From page 2...
... As David Jablonski (63) asks in these proceedings, should we even focus on the five great mass extinctions that capture most attention, or do the more numerous, smaller events scattered throughout the geological record provide closer analogs for the present?
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From page 3...
... , "If we are concerned with avoiding the loss of particular functional groups, or with maximizing the potential source pool for evolutionary recovery, then biodisparity measures may provide a more appropriate assessment, beyond sheer numbers of taxa, of how priorities should be set." Following on from these considerations is the question of whether we should seek to maintain the evolutionary status quo by preserving precise phenotypes of particular species, or whether we should prefer to maintain phylogenetic lines that will enable evolutionary adaptations to persist, thereby leading to new species (67, 68~. Is it sufficient for us to maintain, for example, just the two elephant species we already have, or should we try to keep open the evolutionary option of further elephantlike species in the distant future?
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From page 4...
... (1995) Decreased Taxonomic Selectivity in the Future Extinction Crisis.
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Key Terms

  • biotic crisis
  • evolutionary processes
  • geological record
  • recovery processes
  • mass extinction

  • mass extinctions
  • extinction events
  • opportunistic species
  • gene flow
  • david jablonski

  • time scale
  • oxford univ
  • unusually significant
  • coral reefs
  • cambridge univ

  • environmental disruption
  • grand scale
  • ecosystem function
  • future evolution
  • preferential elimination

  • virtual elimination
  • major extinction
  • tropical forests
  • insect species
  • biotic impoverishment

  • emergent novelties
  • evolutionary future
  • biodiversity loss
  • disjunct populations
  • particular functional


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