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Age-dependent speciation can explain the shape of empirical phylogenies
Citation
Hagen, O and Hartmann, K and Steel, M and Stadler, T, Age-dependent speciation can explain the shape of empirical phylogenies, Systematic Biology, 64, (3) pp. 432-440. ISSN 1063-5157 (2015) [Refereed Article]
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Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
DOI: doi:10.1093/sysbio/syv001
Abstract
Tens of thousands of phylogenetic trees, describing the evolutionary relationships between hundreds of thousands
of taxa, are readily obtainable from various databases. From such trees, inferences can be made about the underlying
macroevolutionary processes, yet remarkably these processes are still poorly understood. Simple and widely used
evolutionary null models are problematic: Empirical trees show very different imbalance between the sizes of the daughter
clades of ancestral taxa compared to what models predict. Obtaining a simple evolutionary model that is both biologically
plausible and produces the imbalance seen in empirical trees is a challenging problem, to which none of the existing models
provide a satisfying answer. Here we propose a simple, biologically plausible macroevolutionary model in which the rate of
speciation decreases with species age, whereas extinction rates can vary quite generally.We show that this model provides
a remarkable fit to the thousands of trees stored in the online database TreeBase. The biological motivation for the identified
age-dependent speciation process may be that recently evolved taxa often colonize new regions or niches and may initially
experience little competition. These new taxa are thus more likely to give rise to further new taxa than a taxon that has
remained largely unchanged and is, therefore, well adapted to its niche. We show that age-dependent speciation may also
be the result of different within-species populations following the same laws of lineage splitting to produce new species.
As the fit of our model to the tree database shows, this simple biological motivation provides an explanation for a long
standing problem in macroevolution.
Item Details
Item Type: | Refereed Article |
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Keywords: | evolutionary biology, phylogenetics, birth–death process, diversification, macroevolution, stochastic models |
Research Division: | Biological Sciences |
Research Group: | Genetics |
Research Field: | Genetics not elsewhere classified |
Objective Division: | Expanding Knowledge |
Objective Group: | Expanding knowledge |
Objective Field: | Expanding knowledge in the biological sciences |
UTAS Author: | Hartmann, K (Dr Klaas Hartmann) |
ID Code: | 99107 |
Year Published: | 2015 |
Web of Science® Times Cited: | 33 |
Deposited By: | IMAS Research and Education Centre |
Deposited On: | 2015-03-13 |
Last Modified: | 2017-11-01 |
Downloads: | 238 View Download Statistics |
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