Neutral selection

TL;DR

This paper integrates neutral biodiversity theory with Darwinian selection by embedding it in a fitness landscape, showing how selection and environmental noise influence species abundance distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a framework combining neutral theory with evolutionary processes, demonstrating how selection and environmental noise affect community structure and species abundance.

Findings

Community structure aligns with Fisher log-series under small mutation steps.

Moderate environmental noise has limited impact on abundance distribution.

Large environmental noise shifts distributions from exponential to power-law decay.

Abstract

Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like selection, adaptation and speciation. Here we show how to embed the neutral theory within the Darwinian framework. In a fitness landscape with a quadratic maximum, typical of quantitative traits, selection restricts the extant species to have traits close to optimal, so that the fitness differences between surviving species are small. For sufficiently small mutation steps, the community structure fits perfectly to the Fisher log-series species abundance distribution. The theory is relatively insensitive to moderate amounts of environmental noise, wherein the location of the fitness maximum changes by amounts of order the width of the noise-free distribution. Adding very large environmental noise to the model qualitatively changes the abundance distributions, converting the exponential fall-off of large species to a power-law decay, typical of a neutral model with environmental noise.