Speciation under Changing Environments
Résumé
Progress in molecular genetics allowed taxonomists to better understand the relationships between species without the bias of morphological similarities. However, access to data from times past is limited to the fossil archives which, being far from complete, can only provide limited information. To address this problem through the field of Artificial Life, we devised a polyvalent sexual reproduction scheme and an automated phylogenetic tool capable of producing, from a stream of genomes, hierarchical species trees with relatively low memory footprint. We assert that these apparatus perform well under reasonable stress by embedding them into 2D simulations of unsupervised plant evolution in textbook cases of geographical speciation. After thousands of generations and millions of plants, the extracted phylogenetic data not only showed the expected results in terms of branching pattern (anagenesis, cladogenesis) but also exhibited complex interactions between species both in space and time.
