| Presentation Detail
Macroevolution Beaulieu, Jeremy [1], O'Meara, Brian C. [2], Donoghue, Michael [3]. Identifying hidden rate changes in the evolution of a binary morphological character: the evolution of plant habit in campanulid angiosperms. The growth of phylogenetic trees in scope and in size is promising from the standpoint of understanding a wide variety of evolutionary patterns and processes. With trees comprised of larger, older, and globally distributed clades, it is likely that the lability of a binary character will differ significantly among lineages, which could lead to errors in estimating transition rates and the associated inference of ancestral states. Here we develop and implement a new method for identifying different rates of evolution in a binary character along different branches of a phylogeny. We illustrate this approach by exploring the evolution of growth habit in the Campanulidae, a flowering plant clade containing some 35,000 species. The distribution of woody versus herbaceous species calls into question the use of traditional models of binary character evolution. The recognition and accommodation of changes in the rate of growth form evolution in different lineages demonstrates, for the first time, a robust picture of growth form evolution across a very large, very old, and very widespread flowering plant clade. We will also show how these methods can easily be extended to address other key questions in comparative biology.
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1 - National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, University of Tennessee, 1122 Volunteer Boulevard, Suite 106, Knoxville, TN, 37996-3410, USA
2 - University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 8424 Mecklenburg Ct., Knoxville, Tennessee, 37923, United States
3 - Yale University, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA
Keywords:
Hidden rates model
binary character
Campanulidae
flowering plants
growth habit.
Presentation Type: Regular Oral Presentation
Session: 27
Location: Cotton B/Snowbird Center
Date: Saturday, June 22nd, 2013
Time: 2:30 PM
Number: 27005
Abstract ID:1127
Candidate for Awards:W.D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Student Presentation |
