An evolutionary trajectory is not always as predictable as the theory of natural selection generally explains. A specific path of history that an organism has experienced often makes the evolutionary outcome unpredictable. This is called historical contingency, defined by Stephen Jay Gould in his writing Wonderful Life. Historical contingency is increasingly recognized as the fundamental evolutionary process in morphology, developmental biology, and community ecology, yet our understanding of this process is highly limited in evolutionary ecology.
All the organisms have their own evolutionary histories in relation to specific geography - ancestral distribution, historical demography, and past immigration. Hence, biogeography has a promising aspect that has generated contingency in evolutionary trajectories. Now, to understand the enormous patterns of biodiversity, we are at the stage of acquiring a sophisticated framework, which does not simply generalize the biogeographic processes but weighs the importance of its path dependency relative to the deterministic process of natural selection.
In this symposium, we will present three biological levels in which the biogeographic process potentially interplays with evolution, 1) genetic architecture and trait evolution, 2) dynamics of speciation rate, and 3) evolution of species interaction and biological communities. Inviting Prof. Jun Kitano and Prof. Tadashi Fukami as commentators, we will discuss how we can integrate these complex interplays into one unified framework, and the prospect of these challenges will be addressed.