Description: Molecular studies reveal highly ordered geographic patterns in plant and animal distributions. The tropics illustrate these patterns of community immobilism leading to allopatric differentiation, as well as other patterns of mobilism, range expansion, and overlap of taxa. Integrating Earth history and biogeography, Molecular Panbiogeography of the Tropics is an alternative view of distributional history in which groups are older than suggested by fossils and fossil-calibrated molecular clocks. The author discusses possible causes for the endemism of high-level taxa in tropical America and Madagascar, and overlapping clades in South America, Africa, and Asia. The book concludes with a critique of adaptation by selection, founded on biogeography and recent work in genetics.
Review Quotes: "I cannot do better than to sum up Heads' book with the words Darwin used to praise Wallace's work on geographical distribution in 1876. This is a '. . . grand and memorable work, which will last for years as the foundation of all future treatises'."--Peter J. James "Biological Journal of the Linnean Society" (12/17/2012 12:00:00 AM)