Coopers and Cladistics

For our first C&C meeting of 2015, I am circulating a article from a just-published issue of Phil Trans Roy Soc B on the theme of "Phylogeny, extinction and

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Date/time
15 Jan 2015 5:30pm

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For our first C&C meeting of 2015, I am circulating a article from a just-published issue of Phil Trans Roy Soc B on the theme of "Phylogeny, extinction and conservation".

 
If extinctions are biased with respect to organismal features such as adaptive traits, this could cause problems with ancestral reconstructions using phylogenies.
 
Intuitively, such biases seem likely to occur.  Davies addresses this question with a simulation approach, using phylogenetic diversity (Faith's PD) as a surrogate for feature diversity.  
 
A couple of years ago, we considered this problem using a slightly different approach and I am also circulating an extract from our paper. Just read the section titled "Extinction" and Figure 3.
 
Meet at the University House cellar bar (in the garden if the weather is good), at 5:30 pm.
 
Coopers and Cladistics is a long-running evolutionary biology discussion group held every second thursday. Please contact Mike Crisp if you would like to be included on the C&C email list.
 
 

Location

University House cellar bar, ANU