The mechanisms of macroevolutionary change are a contentious issue. Paleoecological evidence, presented in this book, shows that evolutionary processes visible in ecological time cannot be used to predict macroevolutionary trends, contrary to Darwin's original thesis. The author discusses how climatic oscillations on ice-age timescales are paced by variations in the Earth's orbit, and have thus been a permanent feature of Earth history. There is, however, little evidence for macroevolutionary change in response to these climatic changes, suggesting that over geological time, macroevolution...

There are mounting concerns that the management of our natural global heritage is failing to arrest the rapid extinction of enormous numbers of "specialized" species, especially in the tropics. This book is about specialization and generalization in the use of resources and habitats. The author employs a broad ecological perspective to address three main questions: how ecologists study variation in resource and habitat use and what we learn from these studies; how well existing theory accounts for observations and what the common threads among disciplines are; and finally, what the...