In this essay, I argue that the seemingly indestructible concept of the community as a local,
interacting assemblage of species has hindered progress toward understanding species
richness at local to regional scales. I suggest that the distributions of species within a region
reveal more about the processes that generate diversity patterns than does the co-
occurrence of species at any given point. The local community is an epiphenomenon that
has relatively little explanatory power in ecology and evolutionary biology. Local …