Integration between ecological and genealogical patterns: where are we?

Genealogical patterns are those that can be followed and fully captured by following 'bloodlines', related lineages, and their common ancestry. Ecological patterns instead can be captured by following physical and chemical flows and cycles. Ecology is the science of ecological patterns, commonly divided into two fields: community ecology, studying the composition and assembly of populations, communities, and metacommunities; and ecosystem science, studying organisms and their environment as parts of an interactive system with 'functions' such as primary productivity, food chain efficiency, and decomposition. Genealogy and its patterns such as the neo-Darwinian natural selection, drift, speciation, and phylogeny were inscribed the powerful framework of the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology. As a side consequence, ecological assemblies were seen as aggregations among genealogies, characterized by secondary, derived patterns: they are the 'stage' for the evolutionary play, summarized at best as 'selective pressures'. Evolutionary ecology, 'macroevolutionary consonance', the dual hierarchy theory, thermodynamic-informational evolutionary theories, and niche construction theory are some of the 20th Century pleas and attempts towards a science that better integrates ecological and genealogical patterns. The talk reviews and assesses such proposals, gives a glance to the present achievements, and outlines some future challenges