Bayesian inference of species diversification rates using DivBayes and SubT

Toyota Auditorium, Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy

One of the major tasks of evolutionary biology is to explain the vast diversity of organisms. Although it is controversial on what basis to recognize species, species are a basic unit of diversity. However, different species recognition concepts tend to agree the further the speciation process has progressed. The diversity of species in a specific group depends on the age of the group and the rate at which it has diversified through time. Differences in diversity between groups may therefore depend on either different ages or different rates of net diversification (speciation minus extinction). In this talk I will present DivBayes and SubT, two programs using Bayesian statistics to estimate diversification rates. DivBayes uses species number and clade age for the estimation while SubT uses node depths in an ultrametric tree. SubT is also able to account for missing taxa in the estimation, a characteristic that may otherwise bias the estimate.