Implicit in the title The Origin Of Species is the question: why the plural? In other words, why isn’t there a singular apex species which dominates this planet? One can imagine an abstract system where natural selection slowly but gradually sifts through variation and designs a best-of-all-replicators. And yet on the contrary it seems that our planet has exhibited an overall tendency of going from lower to higher diversity. The age of stromatolites may be the last epoch when we had the best-of-all-replicators.
These sorts of deep questions about variation drive many of the research projects in evolutionary biology. Often one focuses on a narrow zone of interest. An organism for example which might serve as an illustrative model for more general processes. Or, a particular dynamic which interlocks with other processes to form a whole phenomenon. But on occasion you have to sit and ponder the whole shebang. Why genetic diversity? More specifically, why not more diversity of genetic diversity? The issue here is what is sometimes termed Lewontin’s paradox.
Consider two populations. One population goes through an extreme bottleneck, while the other maintains a large population over the generations. What would you presume in regards to …