Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Morlon, Hélène
• Robin, Stéphane
• Hartig, Florian

Titel

Studying speciation and extinction dynamics from phylogenies: addressing identifiability issues

Ist Teil von

• Trends in ecology & evolution (Amsterdam), 2022-06, Vol.37 (6), p.497-506

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A lot of what we know about past speciation and extinction dynamics is based on statistically fitting birth–death processes to phylogenies of extant species. Despite their wide use, the reliability of these tools is regularly questioned. It was recently demonstrated that vast ‘congruent’ sets of alternative diversification histories cannot be distinguished (i.e., are not identifiable) using extant phylogenies alone, reanimating the debate about the limits of phylogenetic diversification analysis. Here, we summarize what we know about the identifiability of the birth–death process and how identifiability issues can be addressed. We conclude that extant phylogenies, when combined with appropriate prior hypotheses and regularization techniques, can still tell us a lot about past diversification dynamics. Reconstructing past speciation and extinction dynamics from extant phylogenies is one of the main approaches to study the build-up of biodiversity on geological time scales.These reconstructions typically involve a prior hypothesis on the functional form of temporal variations in speciation and extinction rates.Avoiding to formulate a priori hypotheses while still being able to separate speciation and extinction dynamics will require other information such as fossils, constraints on complexity, or statistical regularization techniques.