Heritable variation is a prerequisite for evolutionary change, but the relevance of genetic constraints on macroevolutionary timescales is debated. By using two datasets on fossil and contemporary taxa, we show that evolutionary divergence among populations, and to a lesser extent among species, increases with microevolutionary evolvability. We evaluate and reject several hypotheses to explain this relationship and propose that an effect of evolvability on population and species divergence can be explained by the influence of genetic constraints on the ability of populations to track rapid, stationary environmental fluctuations.

中文翻译：

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进化性预测波动选择下的宏观进化

可遗传的变异是进化变化的先决条件，但遗传约束与宏观进化时间尺度的相关性仍存在争议。通过使用化石和当代分类单元的两个数据集，我们表明种群之间的进化分歧，以及较小程度上物种之间的进化分歧，随着微进化进化性的增加而增加。我们评估并拒绝了几个解释这种关系的假设，并提出进化性对种群和物种分化的影响可以通过遗传约束对种群跟踪快速、稳定的环境波动的能力的影响来解释。