Prior hypotheses or regularization allow inference of diversification histories from extant timetrees

Phylogenies of extant species are widely used to study past diversification dynamics1. The most common approach is to formulate a set of candidate models representing evolutionary hypotheses for how and why speciation and extinction rates in a clade changed over time, and compare those models through their probability to have generated the corresponding empirical tree. Recently, Louca & Pennell2 reported the existence of an infinite number of ‘congruent’ models with potentially markedly different diversification dynamics, but equal likelihood, for any empirical tree (see also Lambert & Stadler3). Here we explore the implications of these results, and conclude that they neither undermine the hypothesis-driven model selection procedure widely used in the field nor show that speciation and extinction dynamics cannot be investigated from extant timetrees using a data-driven procedure.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2020-07-04

• Fields of study

  Biology, Mathematics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/2020.07.03.185074
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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