Theme: Recent work in speciation research by women authors.

Abstract

The Society for the Study of Evolution was established in 1943 by merging the National Research Council with the Society for the Study of Speciation (Evolution, 2021). Two leaders of this group, Mayr and Dobzhansky, set the agenda for decades of speciation research. Mayr's Biological Species Concept (1942), see also (Dobzhansky, 1935) put the focus of speciation research squarely on the evolution of reproductive isolation, and his vehement arguments against the plausibility of sympatric speciation stoked decades of debates over whether or not reproductive isolation could evolve in the absence of geographical isolation. Likewise, Dobzhansky's list of “isolating mechanisms” (1951) and model for the evolution of intrinsic postzygotic isolation (the eponymous Bateson‐Dobzhansky‐Muller model; [Dobzhansky, 1935]) laid the groundwork for comparative and genetic speciation studies. Several prominent contributions to our understanding of speciation were published during the following decades: Bush's empirical study of sympatric host race formation in the apple maggot fly (1969), Felsenstein's modeling work demonstrating how recombination halts progress toward speciation in sympatry (1981), and Coyne and Orr's comparative analyses of the evolution of prezygotic and postzygotic isolation (Coyne & Orr, 1989, 1997). These papers, in turn, have had an enormous influence on modern speciation research, which continues to feature prominently in the pages of Evolution (Matute & Cooper, 2021).