Extending the concept of diversity partitioning to characterize phenotypic complexity

Most components of an organism’s phenotype can be viewed as the expression of multiple traits. Many of these traits operate as complexes, where multiple subsidiary parts function and evolve together. As trait complexity increases, so does the challenge of describing complexity in intuitive, biologically meaningful ways. Traditional multivariate analyses ignore the phenomenon of individual complexity and provide relatively abstract representations of variation among individuals. We suggest adopting well-known diversity indices from community ecology to describe phenotypic complexity as the diversity of distinct subsidiary components of a trait. Using a hierarchical framework, we illustrate how total trait diversity can be partitioned into within-individual complexity (α diversity) and between-individual components (β diversity). This approach complements traditional multivariate analyses. The key innovations are (i) addition of individual complexity within the same framework as between-i...

生物体表型（phenotype）的绝大多数组成部分均可视为多种性状（trait）的表达。其中诸多性状以复合体形式运作，多个亚组分协同行使功能并共同演化。随着性状复杂度提升，以直观且符合生物学意义的方式描述复杂度的挑战也随之增大。传统多变量分析忽略了个体复杂度这一现象，仅能为个体间的变异提供相对抽象的表征。我们建议采用群落生态学（community ecology）中成熟的多样性指数，将表型复杂度定义为某一性状的不同亚组分的多样性。借助层级框架，我们展示了如何将总性状多样性拆解为个体内复杂度（α多样性，α diversity）与个体间组分（β多样性，β diversity）。该方法可作为传统多变量分析的补充。本研究的核心创新点包括：(i) 在与个体间分析同源的框架中纳入个体复杂度