PARENT SESSION
Symposium #7: Paradigms lost: Theory change in ecology.

Organized by: K Cudddington and B Beisner
Monday, August 5. 1:00 PM to 3:45 PM. Leo Rich Theatre.

Modeling the ecological context of evolutionary change: deja vu or something new?

Day, Troy^*,1, ¹ Department of Zoology, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT- Ecological interactions play a fundamental role in creating the selective regimes that govern evolutionary change. Understanding (and predicting) such change therefore requires understanding the reciprocal effects of changes in the densities of interacting populations on the fitness of different individuals in the community. Moreover, the evolutionary change that results from such selective regimes can feedback upon itself by altering the ecological dynamics of the community. As a result, ecological and evolutionary change can be inextricably intertwined. Not surprisingly, the development of a realistic theory and modeling framework for understanding this interface is no small task. Various approaches have been used in the past to accomplish this goal, however, and I will begin by summarizing the most influential of these. More recently, there have been other proposals as well, including a couple of approaches loosely referred to as "adaptive dynamics". I will discuss these theoretical frameworks and illustrate the new insights that they have provided. Finally, I will conclude by asking the question, Are these recent developments really new? I will attempt to provide an answer to this question by drawing out the similarities and differences between adaptive dynamics and more traditional approaches, including approaches from quantitative genetics and game theory.

KEY WORDS: evolution, game theory, quantitative genetics, adaptive dynamics