ArticleSystematic biology2015
Age-dependent speciation can explain the shape of empirical phylogenies.
Article in Systematic biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Limits of the Constant-rate Birth-Death Prior for Phylogenetic Tree Topology Inference.Systematic biology · 2024Pooled it
- Age-dependent Phylodynamics with Application to Single-cell Lineage Trees.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Phylogenetic estimation of diversity-dependent biogeographic rates using deep learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Phylogenetically informed predictions outperform predictive equations in real and simulated data.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Fossils improve extinction-rate estimates under state-dependent diversification models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Fossilized Birth-Death Model Is Identifiable.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- A Diffusion-Based Approach for Simulating Forward-in-Time State-Dependent Speciation and Extinction Dynamics.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2024Article
- Article
- A vectorial tree distance measure.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Unifying Phylogenetic Birth-Death Models in Epidemiology and Macroevolution.Systematic biology · 2021Article
- On asymptotic joint distributions of cherries and pitchforks for random phylogenetic trees.Journal of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- gen3sis: A general engine for eco-evolutionary simulations of the processes that shape Earth's biodiversity.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Distance metrics for ranked evolutionary trees.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- How the past impacts the future: modelling the performance of evolutionarily distinct mammals through time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Per-sample immunoglobulin germline inference from B cell receptor deep sequencing data.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Closing the gap between palaeontological and neontological speciation and extinction rate estimates.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Estimating Age-Dependent Extinction: Contrasting Evidence from Fossils and Phylogenies.Systematic biology · 2018Article
- Article
- treeman: an R package for efficient and intuitive manipulation of phylogenetic trees.BMC research notes · 2017Article
- Bayesian Total-Evidence Dating Reveals the Recent Crown Radiation of Penguins.Systematic biology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issuedErratum.2017
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.