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Biological traits that predictdiversificationratesin birds

Subject: Biological traits that predictdiversificationratesin birds
From: "Tim Murphy" <>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 07:52:24 +1000
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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