Modes and Mechanisms of Plant Speciation: Introduction

Abstract

In a 1977 volume of Benchmark papers (Jameson 1977) concerning the genetics of speciation only five of the 27 papers focus on any plant species as the study organism. The remaining 22 papers focus on animal species. The same is true for a recent symposium on mechanisms of speciation (Barigozzi 1982), where most of the contributions concern animal taxa. This symposium was organized with the hope that it would stimulate needed research in modes and mechanisms of plant speciation. While plant systematists direct considerable effort toward discerning similarity, documenting adaptations within species, and conducting cladistic analyses of taxa at various levels, our understanding of speciation events in plants, especially for perennial taxa, is quite limited. Even though flowering plants, especially annual species, offer certain logistical advantages for analyzing processes of speciation (Stebbins 1982), botanists tend to lag behind zoologists in this area of research. Crawford (this symposium) suggests that botanists have been unduly influenced by zoologists in developing ideas about plant speciation. The possibility that fundamental morphogenetic and developmental differences between plants and animals may require different hypotheses for explanations of the mode of origin and evolution of morphological characters in the two kingdoms has important implications for speciation theory (Gottlieb 1984, p. 682), and further mandates a resurgence of basic research in modes and mechanisms of plant speciation. This symposium was sponsored by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and the Systematics and Genetics Sections of the Botanical Society of America at the meetings of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Colorado State University, 5-9 August 1984. Contributors were Hampton Carson, Ray C. Jackson, Daniel J. Crawford, Amy Jean Gilmartin, Jerrold I Davis, and Warren H. Wagner, Jr.