The role of theory in an emerging new plant reproductive biology

Recent empirical studies hint at an end to the historical solitude between pollination and mating system approaches to plant reproductive character evolution. Now is an opportune time to distill theoretical results into comprehensible insight, and to integrate these findings into the emerging new plant reproductive biology. We outline four theoretical insights for understanding the evolution of reproductive characters, and show how these allow researchers to dissect complex ecological scenarios into clear and evolutionarily relevant components.