Origins and Consequences of Evolutionary Innovation

Understanding how novel, complex features arise in the history of life is one of the oldest and most profound questions in biology. How do evolutionary key innovations—organismal features that enables a species to occupy a previously inaccessible ecological state—originate? What is the relationship between innovation and speciation? Can the origin of an innovation confer evolutionary dynamic consequences for millions of years to come? In this talk, I present recent conceptual and empirical work on key innovations that tests long-standing assumptions about how innovations influence ecological opportunity and diversification. By integrating comparative phylogenetic approaches with ecological and phenotypic data, I evaluate how innovations might alter deep time evolutionary trajectories. Together, these findings point to a more nuanced view in which the consequences of innovation depend on ecological context and historical contingency, highlighting the variable roles of key innovations in shaping biodiversity.