A diversity of phenotypes, beyond species and genes

Abstract

According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (United Nations, 1992; art. 2), “Biological diversity” [...] includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.” The most popular estimations of biodiversity are based on the number of species, commonly, limited to one or a few taxa such as birds, butterflies or flowering plants, sometimes filtered through algorithms highlighting relational properties such as the reciprocal distance of the involved species within a phylogenetic tree. Eventually, from these measures of diversity based on the number of species, the concept of disparity was differentiated, this being an estimate of the taxon’s occupancy of a suitably defined morphospace. Despite these articulations and refinements of the original idea of biological diversity, all these concepts and measures remain essentially confined within a morphological perspective, eventually integrated by taking also genotypic variation into account.