Phyloseminar
How to quantify diversification of real species?
As many biologists, I'm interested in the diversity of species, and the differences in diversity that exist between clades, and I'm thus excited by all the methods that now exist to quantify diversification rates. Indeed, some traits have been proposed to be "key innovations", conferring evolutionary advantages to the lineages in which they evolved. In plants, such traits might be flowers, self-incompatibility, or specialized insect pollination. Although considerable progress has been made in the modelling of diversification rates, the current models remain extremely simple compared to the complex dynamics of diversification in the real world. First, diversification has been shown to be influenced by many intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Second, traits do not act in isolation but are always embedded in the physiological, morphological and ecological context of the species. These are seemingly trivial observations but they have largely faled to be taken into account in diversification research, and I'll explore some of their implications.