The Pith:Climatic and biological evolutionary pressures on an ecosystem complement at different scales. Neither is “dominant,” as that framing is not even wrong.
Yesterday I alluded to the Court Jester hypothesis of evolutionary change, which is often contrasted with the Red Queen hypothesis. The main embarrassment for me as a person who fancies himself a fan of evolutionary process is that I hadn’t ever heard of the Court Jester Hypothesis before yesterday. Therefore I went back to the paper which outlined many of the basic ideas of the model in 2001, Distinguishing the effects of the Red queen and Court Jester on Miocene mammal evolution in the northern Rocky Mountains. To be fair, the hypothesis itself is a tightening of a range of ideas which were long in the air. I did know, for example, about the Turnover-pulse hypothesis. These are all a set of models which emphasize the abiotic selective pressures on life forms, as opposed to the biotic ones. An abiotic pressure would be something like the Younger Dryas cold snap. A biotic pressure might be an exotic invasive species spreading through the …