ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
The evolutionary reality of higher taxa in mammals.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Do the "big four" orders of insects comprise evolutionarily significant higher taxa with coherent patterns of selection on protein-coding genes?Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Reading Yule in light of the history and present of macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Carnivoran Adaptive Landscape Reveals Trade-offs among Functional Traits in the Skull, Appendicular, and Axial Skeleton.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Ere, a Family of Short Interspersed Elements in the Genomes of Odd-Toed Ungulates (Perissodactyla).Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Uncovering the mosaic evolution of the carnivoran skeletal system.Biology letters · 2024Article
- High-Quality Chromosome-Level Genome Assembly of the Corsac Fox (International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- High-quality chromosome-level genome assembly of Tibetan fox (Zoological research · 2022Article
- Paleozoic origins of cheilostome bryozoans and their parental care inferred by a new genome-skimmed phylogeny.Science advances · 2022Article
- Hybridization with mountain hares increases the functional allelic repertoire in brown hares.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Mitochondrial DNA Analysis Clarifies Taxonomic Status of the Northernmost Snow Sheep (Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Nothing Wrong with the Analysis of Clades in Comparative Evolutionary Studies: A Reply to Poe et al.Systematic biology · 2021Article
- Evolutionary and ecological success is decoupled in mammals.Journal of biogeography · 2018Article
- Article
- Approaches to Macroevolution: 1. General Concepts and Origin of Variation.Evolutionary biology · 2017Article
- The challenges to inferring the regulators of biodiversity in deep time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Quantifying the effects of the break up of Pangaea on global terrestrial diversification with neutral theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Article
- Equilibrium and non-equilibrium dynamics simultaneously operate in the Galápagos islands.Ecology letters · 2015Article
- All the better to see you with: eyes and claws reveal the evolution of divergent ecological roles in giant pterygotid eurypterids.Biology letters · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Species are generally regarded as a fundamental unit of biodiversity. By contrast, higher taxa such as genera and families, while widely used as biodiversity metrics and for classification and communication, are generally not believed to be shaped by shared evolutionary processes in the same way as species. We use simulations to show that processes which are important for emergence of evolutionarily significant units (ESUs) at the species level, namely geographical isolation and ecological divergence, can generate evolutionary independence above the species level and thereby lead to emergence of discrete phylogenetic clusters (higher ESUs). Extending phylogenetic approaches for delimiting evolutionarily significant species to broader phylogenetic scales, we find evidence for the existence of higher ESUs in mammals. In carnivores, euungulates and lagomorphs the hierarchical level of units detected correspond, on average, to the level of family or genus in traditional taxonomy. The units in euungulates are associated with divergent patterns of body mass, consistent with occupation of distinct ecological zones. Our findings demonstrate a new framework for studying biodiversity that unifies approaches at species and higher levels, thus potentially restoring higher taxa to their historical status as natural entities.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.