DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-2699.2002.00685.x
Main conclusions: The most commonly demonstrated traits of susceptibility to extinction are those of high resource use, slow recovery rate, and specialization. Yet, while rarity is an inevitable precursor to extinction, specialization is the only trait found to correlate with rarity in this study. We cannot explain this apparent contradiction.
If nothing goes extinct without first being rare, why does rarity in primates correlate with only one of the sets of traits that have been shown to be associated with susceptibility to extinction in primates, not all of them, i.e. with only specialization, and not also with high resource requirements and slow population recovery rate? One of the most important issues an evolutionary biologist can address is, surely, the biology of extinction. If we are puzzled about a link between rarity and extinction, if we do not know what makes a taxon prone to extinction, we leave unexplained the course of evolution. We know what went extinct and when, but we do not know why. This analysis, with its huge amount of variation unexplained, and its surprising result, indicates that even for one of the better known mammalian orders, we are far from a complete understanding of the causes and consequences of rarity and extinction, and therefore of the processes of evolution.
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