Abstract:

Population divergence presents the first step towards the generation of biodiversity and speciation. A common approach to infer something about divergence is to describe and interpret natural patterns of divergence, and I will present some work performed on crossbills (an ecologically highly specialised songbird) in Spain and elsewhere by others and myself. However, the results of such descriptive studies are often rather unsatisfactory or even misleading, and I will present some examples. These studies do help to generate interesting hypotheses about potential processes underlying population divergence, and I will review a recently recognised mechanism that may facilitate divergence in the face of gene flow. In addition, I will review a number of mechanisms that may result in so-called non-random gene flow. Detailed experimental tests of such mechanisms driving divergence have largely yet to be performed, but are of great fundamental and applied importance. 

Seminario organizado por el Departamento de Biodiversidad y Biología Evolutiva del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN), CSIC, y retransmitido a través de Cienciatk.