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From mechanisms to function: an integrated framework of animal innovation

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-05-11, 11:46 authored by Sabine Tebbich, Andrea GriffinAndrea Griffin, Markus F. Peschl, Kim Sterelny
Animal innovations range from the discovery of novel food types to the invention of completely novel behaviours. Innovations can give access to new opportunities, and thus enable innovating agents to invade and create novel niches. This in turn can pave the way for morphological adaptation and adaptive radiation. The mechanisms that make innovations possible are probably as diverse as the innovations themselves. So too are their evolutionary conse- quences. Perhaps because of this diversity, we lack a unifying framework that links mechanism to function. We propose a framework for animal innovation that describes the interactions between mechanism, fitness benefit and evolutionary significance, and which suggests an expanded range of experimental approaches. In doing so, we split innovation into factors (components and phases) that can be manipulated systematically, and which can be investigated both experimentally and with correlational studies. We apply this framework to a selection of cases, showing how it helps us ask more precise questions and design more revealing experiments.

Funding

ARC

History

Journal title

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Volume

371

Issue

1690

Publisher

Royal Society Publishing

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

Faculty of Science and Information Technology

School

School of Psychology

Rights statement

© 2016 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

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