Functional team selection as a framework for local adaptation in plants and their belowground microbiomes.

The paper operates within plant biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. It challenges the traditional paradigm that views evolution and adaptation through the lens of an individual plant or a simple two-partner symbiosis. It proposes a new paradigm where the plant and its belowground microbiome are considered a single, integrated unit of selection—a "functional team" that operates as a complex adaptive system. This shifts the focus from the organism to the holobiont.

This paper is classified as a Model Revolution because it introduces the "Functional Team Selection" (FTS) framework, a new conceptual structure to explain local adaptation in plants. It argues that existing paradigms are insufficient to account for the complex, multi-level, and dynamic interactions within the plant-microbiome system. By synthesizing concepts from complex adaptive systems, multilevel selection, and the extended evolutionary synthesis, FTS provides a novel theoretical foundation and a set of assumptions to guide future research. This represents a deliberate attempt to replace an older, simpler explanatory model with a new, more comprehensive one.