When I started my postdoc in 1998, I think it is safe to say that the Holy Grail (or maybe Rosetta Stone) for many evolutionary biologists was a concept called the Adaptive Landscape. The reason for such exalted status is that the adaptive landscape was then – and remains – the only formal quantitative way to predict and interpret an adaptive radiation of few organisms into many. I was heavily indoctrinated into this framework — as my postdoc was at UBC during precisely the time when Dolph Schluter was writing his now-classic book The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation.
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