Toward an Integrative Historical Biogeography

Toward an Integrative Historical Biogeography1

SYNOPSIS. Cladistic biogeographic methods remain susceptible to the confounding effects of ‘‘pseudo-congruence’’ and ‘‘pseudo-incongruence’’ because they were not designed to incorporate information on the absolute timing of the diversification of lineages. Consequently, results from cladistic biogeographic studies are difficult to interpret and cannot be confidently attributed to any particula...

Historical Biogeography

Historical biogeography can be divided into two subdisciplines: taxon biogeography and area biogeography. In the former we are interested in reconstructing the geographic distribution history of a particular group of organisms. Questions we may be interested in answering include: Where did the organisms originate? How did they colonize the areas in which they live today? When did they first com...

Toward an Integrative Science

We examine the need for a new approach to science that takes into account both structural science, i.e. current science as practiced by most scientists, and structural-phenomenological science, which allows for the coupling of quan-tum theory to brain functions, examines the nature of consciousness, etc. This new approach will result in what is termed integrative science and, we postulate, is t...

Parascript, Parasites and Historical Biogeography

Historical Biogeography of American Beech

American beech (Fagus grandifolia), now a centerpiece species of the eastern deciduous forest, has had a continually changing historical biogeography. This paper reviews the paleoecology, the presettlement occurrence, the modern range, and the current abundance pattern of beech. It synthesizes these four databases into maps representing the distribution and abundance of beech at specific period...