Which Model(s) Explain Biodiversity

Abstract: Like any natural science (for example, physics or chemistry), biology is characterized by a double approach combining observation and theory. Although these two aspects were historically conducted together by great scientific figures (let us mention, for example, Darwin, Galton, Mendel or Fisher for evolutionary biology), both approaches gradually separated during the 20th Century, thus creating two complementary communities. The first one gathered naturalists who mainly focused on the study of diversity patterns , and worked in order to describe and organize individuals and species into clades, which are the relevant unit for the phylogenetic classification of living organisms. The second one was rather concerned by the study of the underlying processes shaping biodiversity, in order to single out and model the main mechanisms at work in Nature. This separation greatly boosted these two branches and generated researchers who were expert in their field. Unfortunately, it also resulted in a decline in the dialogue between “experimental biologists” and “theoreticians”, which only started again with the massive influx of genomic data, hard to analyze without the support of models.