Branching patterns in phylogenies cannot distinguish diversity-dependent diversification from time-dependent diversification
DOI10.5281/zenodo.4110640Zenodo4110640MaRDI QIDQ6693768
Dataset published at Zenodo repository.
Author name not available (Why is that?)
Publication date: 20 October 2020
One of the primary goals of macroevolutionary biology has been to explain general trends in long-term diversity patterns, including whether such patterns correspond to an up-scaling of processes occurring at lower scales. Reconstructed phylogenies often show decelerated lineage accumulation over time. This pattern has often been interpreted as the result of diversity-dependent diversification, where the accumulation of species causes diversification to decrease through niche filling. However, other processes can also produce such a slowdown, including time-dependence without diversity-dependence. To test whether phylogenetic branching patterns can be used to distinguish these two mechanisms, we formulated a time-dependent, but diversity-independent model that matches the expected diversity through time of a diversity-dependent model. We simulated phylogenies under each model and studied how well likelihood methods could recover the true diversification mode. Standard model selection criteria always recovered diversity-dependence, even when it was not present. We correct for this bias by using a bootstrap method and find that neither model is decisively supported. This implies that the branching pattern of reconstructed trees contains insufficient information to detect the presence or absence of diversity-dependence. We advocate that tests encompassing additional data, e.g., traits or range distributions, are needed to evaluate how diversity drives macroevolutionary trends.
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