ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2018
History is written by the victors: The effect of the push of the past on the fossil record.
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Environmental phylogenetics supports a steady diversification of crown eukaryotes starting from the mid-Proterozoic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Evolutionary Tempo, Supertaxa, and Living Fossils.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Exact and efficient phylodynamic simulation from arbitrarily large populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Accounting for extinction dynamics unifies the geological and biological histories of Indo-Australian Archipelago.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Tropical Origin, Global Diversification, and Dispersal in the Pond Damselflies (Coenagrionoidea) Revealed by a New Molecular Phylogeny.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Two Notorious Nodes: A Critical Examination of Relaxed Molecular Clock Age Estimates of the Bilaterian Animals and Placental Mammals.Systematic biology · 2024Article
- No phylogenetic evidence for angiosperm mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene (K-Pg) boundary.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Conceptual and empirical bridges between micro- and macroevolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Review
- Model Species to Investigate the Origin of Flowers.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Reassessing a cryptic history of early trilobite evolution.Communications biology · 2022Review
- New extreme morphologies as exemplified by 100 million-year-old lacewing larvae.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Diversification dynamics of total-, stem-, and crown-groups are compatible with molecular clock estimates of divergence times.Science advances · 2021Article
- Ecological and biogeographic drivers of biodiversity cannot be resolved using clade age-richness data.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Towards quantifying the mass extinction debt of the Anthropocene.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Dead clades walking are a pervasive macroevolutionary pattern.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Fossil data support a pre-Cretaceous origin of flowering plants.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
- Materiality, Agency and Evolution of Lithic Technology: an Integrated Perspective for Palaeolithic Archaeology.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Survivorship biases can generate remarkable apparent rate heterogeneities through time in otherwise homogeneous birth-death models of phylogenies. They are a potential explanation for many striking patterns seen in the fossil record and molecular phylogenies. One such bias is the "push of the past": clades that survived a substantial length of time are likely to have experienced a high rate of early diversification. This creates the illusion of a secular rate slow-down through time that is, rather, a reversion to the mean. An extra effect increasing early rates of lineage generation is also seen in large clades. These biases are important but relatively neglected influences on many aspects of diversification patterns in the fossil record and elsewhere, such as diversification spikes after mass extinctions and at the origins of clades; they also influence rates of fossilization, changes in rates of phenotypic evolution and even molecular clocks. These inevitable features of surviving and/or large clades should thus not be generalized to the diversification process as a whole without additional study of small and extinct clades, and raise questions about many of the traditional explanations of the patterns seen in the fossil record.
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.