Diploid versus haploid models of neutral speciation.

Neutral models of speciation based on isolation by distance and assortative mating, termed topopatric, have shown to be successful in describing abundance distributions and species-area relationships. Previous works have considered this type of process in the context of haploid genomes. Here we discuss the implementation of two schemes of dominance to analyze the effects of diploidy: a complete dominance model in which one allele dominates over the other and a perfect codominant model in which heterozygous genotypes give rise to a third phenotype. In the case of complete dominance, we observe that speciation requires stronger spatial inbreeding in comparison to the haploid model. For perfect codominance, instead, speciation demands stronger genetic assortativeness. Nevertheless, once speciation is established, the three models predict the same abundance distributions even at the quantitative level, revealing the robustness of the original mechanism to describe biodiversity features.