Museum of Zoology and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079, USA
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2017 Dec 5;372(1735). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0417.
Evolutionary innovation contributes to the spectacular diversity of species and phenotypes across the tree of life. 'Key innovations' are widely operationalized within evolutionary biology as traits that facilitate increased diversification rates, such that lineages bearing the traits ultimately contain more species than closely related lineages lacking the focal trait. In this article, I briefly review the inference, analysis and interpretation of evolutionary innovation on phylogenetic trees. I argue that differential rates of lineage diversification should not be used as the basis for key innovation tests, despite the statistical tractability of such approaches. Under traditional interpretations of the macroevolutionary 'adaptive zone', we should not necessarily expect key innovations to confer faster diversification rates upon lineages that possess them relative to their extant sister clades. I suggest that a key innovation is a trait that allows a lineage to interact with the environment in a fundamentally different way and which, as a result, increases the total diversification-but not necessarily the diversification rate-of the parent clade. Considered alone, branching patterns in phylogenetic trees are poorly suited to the inference of evolutionary innovation due to their inherently low information content with respect to the processes that produce them. However, phylogenies may be important for identifying transformational shifts in ecological and morphological space that are characteristic of innovation at the macroevolutionary scale.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.
进化创新有助于生命之树中物种和表型的多样性。“关键创新”在进化生物学中被广泛应用于那些促进多样化率增加的特征，因此具有这些特征的谱系最终包含的物种比缺乏焦点特征的密切相关谱系多。在本文中，我简要回顾了在系统发育树上推断、分析和解释进化创新的方法。我认为，尽管这种方法在统计学上具有可操作性，但不应将谱系多样化率的差异作为关键创新测试的基础。根据对宏观进化“适应区”的传统解释，我们不应期望具有关键创新的谱系相对于其现存姐妹谱系具有更快的多样化率。我认为，关键创新是一种特征，它使谱系能够以一种根本不同的方式与环境相互作用，从而增加了母谱系的总多样化程度，但不一定是多样化速度。单独考虑，系统发育树上的分支模式由于其在产生它们的过程方面的固有低信息量，不适合进化创新的推断。然而，系统发育可能对于识别在宏观进化尺度上具有创新性的生态和形态空间中的变革性转变很重要。本文是主题为“从细胞到社会的创新中的过程和模式”的一部分。
