This is not a sex bomb, but who knows. A couple of weeks ago I was giving a talk at the Escuela Argentina de Matemática y Biología about neutral and non-neutral models in ecology. I was pointed to the paper of Clark 2012 The coherence problem with the Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity with the commentary: the neutral theory is uninformative.
And the paper basically says that neutral models or neutral theory is based on ignorance and that they are incoherent.
Roughly, this science paper suggest that gamma diversity can explain the latitudinal/altitudinal variations in beta diversity so there is no need to invoke different local assembly mechanisms, they use two extensive data sets (One of them is here ). It seems to me that almost the same thing is formulated in the Hubbell’s neutral theory, local alfa diversity is determined by metacommunity (regional or gamma) diversity so beta diversity will also be determined by gamma diversity.