Examples of adaptive peak tracking as found in the fossil record

Abstract

Species that have persisted over millions of years have done so because they have been able to track peaks in an adaptive landscape well enough to survive and reproduce. Such optima are defined by the mean phenotypic values that maximize mean fitness, and they are predominantly functions of the environment, for example the sea temperature. The mean phenotypic values over time will thus predominantly be determined by the environment over time, and the trait history may be found in the fossil record. Here I use fossil data from three cases found in the literature, and I show that adaptive peak tracking models give better results than alternative weighted least squares and directional random walk models. The model performances are compared by use of weighted mean squared errors and Akaike information criterion results.