An Evolving View of Character Macroevolution.
Tribble CM, Martínez-Gómez J, Rothfels CJ, May MR
Evolutionary Biology
Every wildflower color, leaf shape, and bark texture you notice on a hike is the product of millions of years of evolutionary tinkering — and new methods that reconstruct that history more accurately will sharpen our ability to predict which wild plants are most at risk as climates shift.
When scientists want to understand why plants (or animals) look the way they do, they compare traits across thousands of species. This paper argues we've been doing it in the wrong order — first building the family tree, then layering on the traits — when really the traits and the tree are intertwined and should be figured out together. Getting this right means more accurate answers to big questions like why certain flowers evolved their colors, or which lineages are more likely to go extinct.
Key Findings
Traditional phylogenetic comparative methods treat the evolutionary tree as fixed and separate from trait data, but this two-step approach misses important feedback between trait evolution and species diversification.
Joint inference — simultaneously estimating the evolutionary tree and how traits changed along it — produces more accurate reconstructions, especially for understanding speciation and extinction linked to specific character states.
Six major methodological frontiers are identified where joint inference is most powerful: state-dependent diversification, mixed discrete/continuous traits, hidden process variation, divergence-time estimation, ancestral state reconstruction, and alignment-plus-phylogeny inference.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists are proposing a major shift in how we study how plant and animal traits evolve over millions of years — instead of treating the family tree of life as a fixed backdrop, they argue we should figure out the tree and the traits together, simultaneously, because each shapes the other.
Abstract Preview
Phenotypes serve as the interface between organisms and their environments and are thus pivotal for comprehensive biological understanding. However, comparative analyses of species' phenotypes must...
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