Abstract
Biodiversity is a fundamental concept in biology. By biodiversity scientists usually mean taxic richness, i.e., the number of species, genera, or other higher taxonomic categories. Diversity sometimes is equated to the complexity of biological systems, but at the higher hierarchical level of observation (in: McShea DW, Brandon RN (2010) Biology's first law: the tendency for diversity and complexity to increase in evolutionary systems, University of Chicago Press, Chicago). Therefore, diversity is a deeply hierarchical concept that can be applied to multiple levels of observation in biology. Here we will concentrate on the problems of the dynamics of taxonomic diversity—the transitive currency of evolutionary, ecological, and developmental biology.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Kenneth McKenna and Stuart Newman for the opportunity to contribute this essay. We also thank Bruce Lieberman for many suggestions which significantly improved and clarified the essay.
Funding
The research of A. Spiridonov was supported by the Research Council of Lithuania project S-MIP-21-9 “The role of spatial structuring in major transitions in macroevolution.” S. Lovejoy acknowledges the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada for support.
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Spiridonov, A., Lovejoy, S. Scaling in the Evolution of Biodiversity. Biol Theory 18, 1–6 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-022-00427-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-022-00427-9