"A male fiddler crab's single large claw should be both long and lightweight for attracting a mate but short and stout for fighting. These seemingly incompatible designs can co-exist when evolution favors novel compensatory features that ameliorate negative tradeoffs, thereby supporting the simultaneous dual function of the claw."

Biology and philosophy – Our thinking about and expectation for adaptations depend critically on our understanding of the nature of teleology in evolution. Humans use rational thought to plan ahead. When our goal is to make an object that performs a certain task we follow plans that specify the processes and steps necessary to construct the object that so that it performs in the desired manner. When we think about evolution we often are tempted to say that a trait of an organism evolves to perform a certain function. But this is wrong: adaptive function is a consequence not a goal of evolution. Such faulty reasoning has become very common in studies of mate choice that claim male traits evolve to reveal male “quality” or some other feature to potential mates. I am exploring the philosophical and biological basis of this error, its ramifications in both empirical and theoretical studies in the field, and how to correct it.

Questions related to adaptation and design:

How are morphological and behavioral traits shaped by multiple modes of natural and sexual selection? How does the phenotype respond to countervailing selection from two or more processes? What social and ecological factors facilitate trait exaggeration? How are costs kept in check as traits become exaggerated under sexual selection? Under what circumstances do the traits males use to court females during mating become exaggerated? Do morphological specializations for feeding reduce or expand the kinds of foods animals consume? How does the timing of reproduction respond to short-term changes in temperature and tidal patterns and how will these responses determine long-term success as the global climate changes?

Modern Caribbean coral reefs are a pale shadow of what they once were, but exactly what did a “pristine” coral reef look like? Holocene fossil records of corals and mollusc skeletons, fish otoliths, sponge spicules and shark dermal denticles offer a chance to reconstruct reef communities over the last few thousand years, while isotopic analyses can describe the changes in environments. These data help reveal the relative roles of natural changes in climates and human impacts on modern reef deterioration, provide clear and quantitative objectives for coral reef conservation, and reveal if ecological processes have changed significantly on modern reefs.

Rigorous quantitative sampling of fossil communities aligned with high-resolution paleoenvironmental reconstructions can reveal how environments constrain and select for different ways of making a living, and how environments shape the functioning of biological communities, leading to insights into ecological and evolutionary processes with potential insights into the how life will respond to future global change.

The isolation of the Atlantic from the high-nutrient Pacific Ocean during the Pliocene drove an ecological revolution in the Caribbean, providing opportunities for new life forms while causing the extinction of others. Isotopic profiling of marine gastropods helps us reconstruct seasonal changes in temperatures and nutrient sources in coastal Caribbean seas over the last 10 million years. We combine this information with large-scale sampling of fossil mollusks, corals, fish and other life to explore how benthic and nektonic communities evolved during these changes, and reveal the origin of the modern Caribbean Sea. 

Humans are somewhat unusual when it comes to predation because we tend to hunt the biggest animals. Continuous removal of the largest individuals in a population applies a selective pressure to reproduce at a smaller size, potentially causing evolution. The fossil and archeological records gives us the chance to observe changes in the life histories of socio-economically important animals before and during long-term harvesting. Our aim is to tease apart the relative importance of humans and natural ecological, physiological and evolutionary changes.