Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA.
Department of Zoology and Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Syst Biol. 2023 Nov 1;72(5):1188-1198. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syad032.
Evolutionary dynamics operating across deep time leave footprints in the shapes of phylogenetic trees. For the last several decades, researchers have used increasingly large and robust phylogenies to study the evolutionary history of individual clades and to investigate the causes of the glaring disparities in diversity among groups. Whereas typically not the focal point of individual clade-level studies, many researchers have remarked on recurrent patterns that have been observed across many different groups and at many different time scales. Whereas previous studies have documented various such regularities in topology and branch length distributions, they have typically focused on a single pattern and used a disparate collection (oftentimes, of quite variable reliability) of trees to assess it. Here we take advantage of modern megaphylogenies and unify previous disparate observations about the shapes embedded in the Tree of Life to create a catalog of the "major features of macroevolution." By characterizing such a large swath of subtrees in a consistent way, we hope to provide a set of phenomena that process-based macroevolutionary models of diversification ought to seek to explain.
进化动力学在深远的时间跨度上发挥作用，在系统发育树的形状中留下了痕迹。在过去的几十年里，研究人员利用越来越大、越来越稳健的系统发育树来研究个体分支的进化历史，并调查群体之间多样性明显差异的原因。虽然通常不是个体分支水平研究的重点，但许多研究人员已经注意到在许多不同的群体和许多不同的时间尺度上观察到的反复出现的模式。虽然以前的研究已经记录了拓扑和分支长度分布的各种规则，但它们通常集中在单个模式上，并使用不同的（通常，可靠性差异很大）树集合来评估该模式。在这里，我们利用现代大系统发育树，将以前关于生命之树中嵌入的形状的不同观察结果统一起来，创建了一个“宏观进化主要特征”的目录。通过以一致的方式对如此大的子树进行特征化，我们希望提供一组现象，多样化的基于过程的宏观进化模型应该试图解释这些现象。
