Understanding the origins and early stages of diversification is one of the most elusive tasks in adaptive radiation research. Classical approaches, which aim to infer past processes from present-day patterns of biological diversity, are fraught with difficulties and assumptions. An alternative approach has been to study young clades of relatively few species, which may represent the putative early stages of adaptive radiation. However, it is difficult to predict whether those groups will ever reach the ecological and morphological disparity observed in the sorts of clades usually referred to as adaptive radiations, thereby making their utility in informing the early stages of such radiations uncertain. Caribbean Anolis lizards are a textbook example of an adaptive radiation; anoles have diversified independently on each of the 4 islands in the Greater Antilles, producing replicated radiations of phenotypically diverse species. However, the underlying processes that drove these radiations occurred 30-65 million years ago and so are unobservable, rendering major questions about how these radiations came to be difficult to tackle. What did the ancestral species of the anole radiation look like? How did new species arise? What processes drove adaptive diversification? Here, we review what we have learned about the cryptic early stages of adaptive radiation from studies of Anolis lizards, and how these studies have attempted to bridge the process-pattern divide of adaptive radiation research. Despite decades of research, however, fundamental questions linking eco-evolutionary processes to macroevolutionary patterns in anoles remain difficult to answer.

中文翻译：

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弥合过程模式鸿沟以了解适应性辐射的起源和早期阶段：从 Anolis 蜥蜴研究中获得见解的方法回顾

了解多样化的起源和早期阶段是适应性辐射研究中最难以捉摸的任务之一。旨在从当今生物多样性模式推断过去过程的经典方法充满了困难和假设。另一种方法是研究相对较少物种的年轻进化枝，这可能代表了适应性辐射的假定早期阶段。然而，很难预测这些群体是否会达到通常被称为适应性辐射的进化枝中观察到的生态和形态差异，从而使它们在告知此类辐射的早期阶段的效用不确定。加勒比 Anolis 蜥蜴是适应性辐射的教科书示例；anoles 在大安的列斯群岛的 4 个岛屿中的每个岛屿上都独立地多样化，产生表型多样化物种的复制辐射。然而，驱动这些辐射的潜在过程发生在 30-6500 万年前，因此无法观察到，这使得关于这些辐射如何变得难以解决的主要问题难以解决。anole 辐射的祖先物种是什么样的？新物种是如何产生的？哪些过程推动了适应性多样化？在这里，我们回顾了我们从 Anolis 蜥蜴研究中了解到的关于适应性辐射的早期阶段的秘密，以及这些研究如何试图弥合适应性辐射研究的过程模式鸿沟。然而，尽管经过数十年的研究，