4 Morphology and Morphological

Diversity

4.1 introduction

We have been considering the relationship between species richness

and phenotype diversity, in Stephen Jay Gould’s useful terminology, be-
tween diversity and disparity. Diversity depends on, and hence is a sign
of, ecological and evolutionary mechanisms (speciation, migration, and
local extinction all influence the diversity of a regional biota). That di-
versity, once in place, then constrains future change. As we shall see in
chapter 6, the diversity of local systems is intimately tied to regional
species richness. These processes also build the disparity of regional and
global biotas. Phenotypes change through local adaptation, migration,
and adaptive plasticity. That disparity, once in place, constrains further
change, as new phenotypes allow organisms individually and collec-
tively to shape their environments in new ways. So diversity, disparity,
and the relationships between them matter.
In the last chapter, though, we saw that despite the intuitive plausi-
bility of this distinction, it is difficult to make the notion of disparity em-
pirically and theoretically tractable. A central theme of this chapter is
that, while species richness does not determine morphological disparity,
disparity is conceptually tied to diversity. Patterns in speciation anchor
the features of phenotypes we can meaningfully measure and compare.
The discussion here will be an echo of that in 1.2, where we discussed
the phenetics program in taxonomy. We argued there that similarity and
difference must be defined with respect to particular characteristics or
traits. That same issue arises for disparity, and we claim that it can be
solved only by relativizing disparity to particular clades.
One main message of chapter 3 was that phenotypic biodiversity
in general, and morphological biodiversity in particular, is not well
captured by Linnaean taxonomy. The initial metazoan radiation is