Santa Fe Institute

Colloquium

April 30, 2013
3:30 PM
Noyce Conference Room

Sarah "Sally" Otto (Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia)

Abstract.   I will describe BiSSE, a likelihood-based approach to infer how speciation and extinction rates depend on the state of a particular character.  The phylogenetic tree of a group of species contains information about character transitions and about diversification: higher speciation rates, for example, give rise to shorter branch lengths. The likelihood method that we have developed uses the information contained in a phylogeny and integrates over all possible evolutionary histories to infer the speciation and extinction rates for species with different character states.  Our method can be used to provide more detailed information than previous methods, allowing us to disentangle whether a particular character state is rare because species in that state are prone to extinction, are unlikely to speciate, or tend to move out of that state faster than they move in.

Purpose: Research Collaboration

SFI Host: Evandro Ferrada

More Info

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