Digest: Trait-dependent diversification and its alternatives.

Abstract

Species selection – variation in diversification rates associated with variation in species traits – was once a fringe idea, at least among population biologists. But following the development of a novel suite of phylogenetic comparative methods (e.g, BiSSE; Maddison et al. 2007), comparative biologists went looking for evidence of species selection and found it, seemingly everywhere. However, recent studies have shown that state-dependent speciation and extinction models (SSE) were prone to detecting associations between diversification rates with phenotypic traits under a variety of situations where the diversification rates were simulated completely independently of the traits (Maddison and FitzJohn 2015, Rabosky and Goldberg 2015). These findings led to a crisis in the field; it was unclear which previous discoveries were actually discoveries, and which were false positives. In this issue, Rabosky and Goldberg (2017) develop an approach, which they call FiSSE, that is less likely to find spurious associations between binary traits and diversification rates. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved