Ecological Niche Modeling is a great tool for conservation biology, phylogeography and evolutionary biology. However, as Jeff Lozier and colleagues point out in a paper in the Journal of Biogeography that the models are only as good as the data they are based on.The basic premise of the ENM approach is to predict the occurrence of species on a landscape from georeferenced site locality data and sets of spatially explicit environmental data layers that are assumed to correlate with the species’ range.
I'm an evolutionary biologist and assistant professor at Queens College, City University of New York, who studies bacteriophage life history stochasticity and the population dynamics of host/pathogen interactions. I employ techniques from ecology, m…
"The conflict between maternal and fetus genes is one of the weirdest ideas in the modern theory of evolution."* According to evolutionary logic, the fetus "wants" to milk the mother for all it can get; the mother "wants" to restrict the fetus to what it needs to survive and save something for future offspring. The reason is that the fetus benefits from every bit of help the mother gives, while the mother's return on her investment diminishes with increasing investment, (i.e. ever greater investment won't necessarily increase her fitness).
