Abstract
Lanfear et al. (1) reported an interesting association between mutation rate and net diversification in birds that had not been as evident in other groups of organisms. More specifically, their data showed a correlation between synonymous substitution rate and net diversification that cannot be explained by selection, effective population size, or some plausibly covarying life-history trait. To arrive at these results, the authors used a sister-pairs approach (adopted from ref. 2) to examine the relationships between rates of molecular evolution, net diversification, and life-history traits across 32 pairs of bird families. Unfortunately, however, Lanfear et al. (1) mistakenly equated clade size with net diversification, which may possibly obscure some of their findings.
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