Evolutionary Biology pp 369-398 | Cite as
Random Walk and the Biometrics of Morphological Characters
Abstract
There is great power in Sewall Wright’s metaphor of the adaptive landscape, the representation of fitness as a function of position in an abstract genotypic or phenotypic parameter space. When this conception is combined with a uniform prior model for the provenance of biological variation, then the density of samples near a point of phenotypic space becomes indicative of the fitness of the organism typical of that point. In this way, an empirical distribution of organisms or species over a morphometric parameter space becomes a description of relative fitness. [See, for instance, Raup (1967) or Bookstein et al. (1985, Section 5.4).] Peaks of relative frequency are taken to connote evolutionary successes, and gaps stand for phenotypes that either have been blocked from occurring or else, once extant, were eliminated by selection.
Keywords
Random Walk Morphological Character Standard Length Elementary Step Planktonic ForaminiferaPreview
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