Emergence of Diversity at Different Scales of Space, Time, and Organizational Complexity within Mammalia

Underpinning much of the research surrounding evolution and anatomy of mammals is a unified conceptual framework for the emergence and maintenance of diversity. Diversity emerges from experiments carried out by Nature across scales of space and time. As stated by theoretical biologists Noah Rosenberg and Rasmus Nielsen, Natures' ‘experiments’ differ from those performed by humans in two aspects: first, there is no replication, and second, the initial and boundary conditions of the ‘experiment’ are unobservable and therefore unknowable. Furthermore, as stated by theoretical ecologist Simon A. Levin, understanding the emergence of diversity depends on the extent to which the processes that generate diversity preserve or destroy information. Statistical methodologies are invaluable tools in pursuing this task. Given the unknowability of initial and boundary conditions and the preservation/destruction continuum, the statistical formalism is that of the inverse problem, which is the technique of extracting from a set of observations the causal factors that produced them.

Questions about the emergence and maintenance of diversity are age-old. Therefore, the task of the scientist, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger observed, “… is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday”. With this in mind, in this Research Topic we would like to address questions surrounding the emergence and maintenance of diversity within Mammalia. The fundamental task is to understand how patterns at one scale are the result of processes that operate at other scales and to apportion the causes of diversity among exogenous and endogenous causes.

We welcome contributions surrounding experimental, observational, theoretical and statistical approaches to exploring these questions, unified in the search for order in a wide array of phenomena, structures and processes emerging at different scales of space, time, and organizational complexity within Mammalia. Themes may include, but are not limited to:

• Morphogenesis and the origin of morphological diversity
• Environmental, ecological and evolutionary determinants of diversity
• Statistical and mathematical formalisms for describing and interpreting diversity
• Process and mechanisms underlying patterns of speciation and extinction
• Interactions, macroecology and macroevolution
• Ancestral processes, demography and human history