Thanks - what you quote looks like a "publish and perish" article. Jobs are
hard to get in the biology field.
Best regards
Tim Murphy
-----Original Message-----
From:
Behalf Of Andrew Taylor
Sent: Tuesday, 27 June 2006 8:41 PM
To: Graham Turner
Cc: Baus
Subject: Biological traits that
predictdiversificationratesin birds
On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 05:25:17PM +1000, Graham Turner wrote:
> These traits came first, then the birds were slotted into taxa. Thus
> it becomes bleeding obvious that the reson these birds are
> grouped together is that they are similar.
You should read the paper. They used genetic not phenetic phylogenies
- grouping by DNA similarity not traits. I've appended part of the
paper's introduction to give you a flavour of it. Most of the paper is
taken up with the methods. Testing hypotheses like this quantitatively
is challenging. Claiming a hypothesis is obvious is much easier -
but doesn't help when opinions differ about what is obvious.
Andrew
A large body of work on [phylogenetic tree imbalance] has given rise
to a plethora of biological explanations for why there is so much
variation in clade richness, defined here as the number of extant species
within a lineage. These have invoked a wide range of lineage-specific
characteristics to explain the observed variation in clade richness,
including body size (refs), life history (refs), sexual selection (refs),
ecological generalization (refs), ecological specialization (refs),
behavioral drive (refs), and geographical range size (refs). Tested
in isolation, some of these hypotheses have received empirical support
(refs), while others have been widely refuted (refs). The most striking
aspect of these tests, however, is that, although some of the associations
are statistically significant, the proportion of variance explained is
generally rather small (refs).
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