Complex ecosystems display well-defined macroscopic regularities suggesting that some generic dynamical rules operate at the ecosystem level where the relevance of the single-species features is rather weak. Most evolutionary theory deals with genes/species as the units of selection operating on populations. However, the role of ecological networks and external perturbations seems to be at least as important as microevolutionary events based on natural selection operating at the smallest levels. It is suggested that the evolutionary dynamics of ecological networks leads to fundamental laws of ecology-level dynamics which naturally decouple micro from macroevolutionary dynamics. Using
simple models of macroevolution, most of the available statistical information obtained from the fossil record is remarkably well reproduced and explained within a new theoretical framework. 

Back