This hypothesis originated in a 1964 paper by Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven, "Butterflies and plants: a study in coevolution". While this paper outlined the concept, the actual term "escape and radiate" was not actually coined until 1989 by John N. Thompson. The theory has been highly influential in chemical ecology and plant evolutionary ecology, but remains controversial due to the difficulty of collecting decisive evidence as well as uncertainty about the mechanisms linking ecological escape with evolutionary diversification.