Estimating the duration of speciation from phylogenies.

ABSTRACT: Speciation is not instantaneous but takes time. The protracted birth-death diversification model incorporates this fact and predicts the often observed slowdown of lineage accumulation toward the present. The mathematical complexity of the protracted speciation model has barred estimation of its parameters until recently a method to compute the likelihood of phylogenetic branching times under this model was outlined (Lambert et al. ). Here, we implement this method and study using simulated phylogenies of extant species how well we can estimate the model parameters (rate of initiation of speciation, rate of extinction of incipient and good species, and rate of completion of speciation) as well as the duration of speciation, which is a combination of the aforementioned parameters. We illust

SUBMITTER: Etienne RS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4262007 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature