Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life
Abstract
Here is one biologist's interpretation of the chronology of life during the last six hundred million years of earth history: an extended essay that draws on the author's own data and a wide-ranging literature survey to discuss the nature and dynamics of evolutionary change in organisms and their biological surroundings. Geerat Vermeij demonstrates that escalation--the process by which species adapt to, or are limited by, their enemies as the latter increase in ability to acquire and retain resources--has been a dominant theme in the history of life despite frequent episodes of extinction.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Sometimes, as with the escalation of durophagous predation through the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, large-scale trends do appear to reflect upward-cascading effects from the organismic level.
“large-scale trends do appear to reflect upward-cascading effects from the organismic level”
From SCALE AND HIERARCHY IN MACROEVOLUTION (2007) · cites this paper as Vermeij 1987
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
Cited by 1,154
- Authors
- Vermeij, G. J.
- Corresponding author
- Vermeij, Geerat J.
- ORCID
- Vermeij, Geerat J.
- Venue
- Princeton University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Published
- 1987-12-31
- OpenAlex
- W2971029775
- Cited by
- 1,154
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 27 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 38 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 32 · 2018: 25 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 38 · 2015: 36 · 2014: 39 · 2013: 39 · 2012: 38
- FWCI
- 28.40
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Princeton University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Evolution and Paleontology Studies
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Paleontology and Stratigraphy of Fossils
- Keywords
- arms race, predator-prey interactions, evolutionary change, extinction, Cenozoic, history of life, resource competition
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
