The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution

Response to Tcherkez and Farquhar: Rubisco adaptation is more limited by phylogenetic constraint than by catalytic trade-off

Rubisco is the primary entry point for carbon into the biosphere. It has been widely proposed that rubisco is highly constrained by catalytic trade-offs due to correlations between the enzyme's kinetic traits across species. In previous work, we have shown that the strength of these correlations, and thus the strength of catalytic trade-offs, have been overestimated due to the presence of phylogenetic signal in the kinetic trait data (Bouvier et al., 2021). We demonstrated that only the trade-offs between the Michaelis constant for CO2 and carboxylase turnover, and between the Michaelis constants for CO2 and O2 were robust to phylogenetic effects. We further demonstrated that phylogenetic constraints have limited rubisco adaptation to a greater extent than the combined action of catalytic trade-offs. Recently, however, our claims have been contested by Tcherkez and Farquhar (2021), who have argued that the phylogenetic signal we detect in rubisco kinetic traits is an artefact of species sampling, the use of rbcL-based trees for phylogenetic inference, laboratory-to-laboratory variability in kinetic measurements, and homoplasy of the C4 trait. In the present article, we respond to these criticisms on a point-by-point basis and conclusively show that all are unfounded. As such, we stand by our original conclusions. Namely, although rubisco kinetic evolution has been limited by biochemical trade-offs, these are not absolute and have been previously overestimated due to phylogenetic biases. Instead, rubisco adaptation has in fact been more limited by phylogenetic constraint.

Claude Lévi-Strauss as a humanist forerunner of cultural macroevolution studies

Cross-cultural studies of humans using methods developed in evolutionary biology and comparative linguistics are flourishing. 'Cultural macroevolution' has great potential to address fundamental questions of cultural transformation and human history. However, this field is poorly integrated with core cultural anthropology, although both aim in part at addressing similar issues. Claude Lévi-Strauss established a comparative approach searching for universals and documentation of diversity to bring understanding to cultural phenomena. Recognizing the nomothetic nature of Lévi-Strauss' work, his abstraction and modelling, provides an example within anthropology of the search for universals and the study of big data, akin to cultural macroevolution studies. The latter could benefit, beyond the sophisticated analyses of big data mined from ethnographic work, from the integration with the intellectual legacy and practice of core anthropology and thus propitiate the synergistic interaction of disciplines. Attempts at rapprochement of disciplines from the natural sciences that lack pluralism and present a narrow view are deemed examples of 'Wilson's effect'.