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Nature 421, 225-226 (16 January 2003) | doi:10.1038/421225b

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Evolutionary biology: Splitting in space

Diethard Tautz

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Disjunct distributions of closely related species are not necessarily the outcome of passive fragmentation of populations. Instead, they can be the consequence of speciation within a population.

Until recently, the overriding credo for explaining how new species are formed has run as follows: first, a population of organisms splits into several subpopulations; once isolated from other members of their own kind, these subpopulations become adapted to local conditions; so, over millions of years, their descendants evolve into new species. This is 'allopatric speciation', a concept in which spatial separation comes first and genetic divergence follows, and which has dominated biological thinking for many decades.