Gadagkar, R (2021) More Fun Than Fun: Evolution on Islands in Water, in the Sky and Elsewhere. In:
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Abstract
Islands, both in the literary sense of land surrounded by water and the metaphorical sense of anything being isolated and surrounded by something else, have played an important role in the process of evolution and for our study of it. By the very fact of their isolation, islands permit rapid evolutionary changes and the formation of new species, allowing evolution to perform ‘pilot’ experiments not easily possible on the mainland. And it is their relatively small size that makes it easier for us to uncover the processes and document the products of evolution. Hence the pride of place for the sub-discipline of island biogeography in the study of evolution. Not surprisingly, both the co-discoverers of the principle of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, were island biogeographers before they became evolutionary biologists, deriving key insights from their expeditions to the Galapagos Islands and the Malay Archipelago, respectively.
| Item Type: | Editorials/Short Communications |
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| Additional Information: | The copyright of this article belongs to the Authors. |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Aug 2021 05:29 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Jun 2022 07:33 |
| URI: | https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/69047 |
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