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The study of adaptation—a central issue in biology since before the time of Darwin—is currently enjoying a renaissance. Ridiculed two decades ago as following a panglossian paradigm (1) that promulgated “just so stories” rather than testing hypotheses, evolutionary biology has become a vibrant field in which a wide variety of methods—ranging from molecular developmental biology to manipulative field experiments—are used to rigorously test adaptive hypotheses (2). Nowhere is this more evident than in the study of ecological character displacement; a paper by Adams and Rohlf (3) in a recent issue of PNAS is one of a growing number of studies that have used integrative, multidisciplinary approaches and have demonstrated that ecological character displacement appears to be an important ecological and evolutionary phenomenon. The theory of ecological character displacement was first explicitly developed by W. L. Brown and E. O. Wilson in 1956 (4). The idea underlying this theory is quite simple: Suppose that two very similar species come into contact. If resources are limiting, the species are likely to compete strongly. One possible outcome is competitive exclusion: the superior competitor will triumph and the inferior one will become extinct. But an alternative possibility is that natural selection will favor, in each population, those individuals whose phenotype allows them to use resources not used by members of the other species (Fig. 1). The result may be that the populations diverge in phenotype and resource use (hence the term displacement), thus reducing resource competition and permitting coexistence (Fig. 1). (Upper) Two sympatric species with broadly overlapping distributions of resource use. If resources are limiting, then natural selection may favor individuals in each species with traits that allow each of them to use that portion of the resource spectrum not used by the other species, as indicated by the arrows. (Lower) The result …

Ecological character displacement and the study of adaptation