We are all familiar with what the French call l'esprit d'escalier, thinking of the right response only after leaving the party. A well-known feature of island biogeography is relative speed, as in the differentiation of Darwin's finches unbuffered by large continental gene pools. A second accelerating feature of islands is that a species can go extinct locally. Should disease or climate change then shrink this boomtime population, some of those rarer variants may prove to have the right combination of features to survive the bottleneck and repopulate the island.
Archipelagos allow for many parallel experiments.
This abstract is a duplicate of Soc.