In the 1960s 70s, Danko Brncic, a population geneticist educated in the tradition of Dobzhansky and the modern synthesis, led the most important diversification process in the study of evolutionary biology in the country.
The patterns of diversification in the intensely studied attine fungiculture are only gradually starting to be understood, as brought out by recent papers on leaf-cutter fungiculture which reverse earlier impressions of certainty for some important issues [ 34, 35].
There is a change in agriculture landscape both in income diversification and farmland cover in the study area.
Although spatial heterogeneity was crucial for the diversification in both studies, there is an important difference between the two.
Over the last ten years I have been studying amphibian diversification in the Gulf of Guinea archipelago, a chain of islands off the coast of Central Africa that is composed of one land-bridge island (Bioko) and three oceanic islands (Príncipe, São Tomé, and Annobón).
Phylogeography has been widely used to study processes of diversification in the context of the geological and climatic history of a geographic region [ 1].
Our study reveals that lineage diversification in the continental genus Liolaemus, one of Earth's most prolific vertebrate radiations, conforms to a diversity-dependent model.
What these aggregate figures conceal, but which emerges clearly from many of the case studies, is the extraordinary diversification in the basket of agricultural export commodities which many countries have achieved in the past decade.
For example, it has been suggested that the node density effect, where molecular branch-lengths which pass through more nodes tend to be longer, could be responsible for the association between rates of molecular evolution and diversification in some studies [ 32].
These results fit well with the previous findings from several groups, which showed similar intermolecular antibody diversification in longitudinal studies of lupus patients and mice [ 1, 30, 31].
