|
Push Of The Past
The push of the past is a type of survivorship bias associated with evolutionary diversification when extinction is possible. Groups that survive a long time are likely to have “got off to a flying start”, and this statistical bias creates an illusion of a true slow-down of diversification rate through time. Birth–Death modelling in evolutionary studies The evolutionary processes of speciation and extinction can be modelled with a stochastic “ birth–death model” (BDM), which is an important component in the study of macroevolution. A BDM assigns each species a certain probability of splitting (\lambda) or going extinct (\mu) per interval of time. This gives rise to an exponential distribution, with the number of species in a particular clade ''N'' at any time ''t'' given by N_= N_e^, although this expression only gives the expected value when N and t are large (see below). In the special case of there being no extinction, this simplifies to the so-called "Yule pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation "proves" causality. Another kind of survivorship bias would involve thinking that an incident was not all that dangerous because the only people who were involved in the incident who can speak about it are those who survived it. Even if one knew that some people are dead, they would not have their voice to add to the conversation, leading to bias in the conversation. As a general experimental ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diversification Rates
Diversification rates are the rates at which new species form (the Speciation rate, λ) and living species go extinct (the extinction rate, μ). Diversification rates can be estimated from fossils, data on the species diversity of clades and their ages, or phylogenetic trees. Diversification rates are typically reported on a per-lineage basis (e.g. speciation rate per lineage per unit of time), and refer to the diversification dynamics expected under a birth–death process. A broad range of studies have demonstrated that diversification rates can vary tremendously both through time and across the tree of life. Current research efforts are focused on predicting diversification rates based on aspects of species or their environment. Diversification rates are also subject to various survivorship biases such as the "Push of the past" Methods for estimating diversification rates Fossil time series Diversification rates can be estimated time-series data on fossil occurrences. Wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stochastic
Stochastic (, ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselves, these two terms are often used synonymously. Furthermore, in probability theory, the formal concept of a ''stochastic process'' is also referred to as a ''random process''. Stochasticity is used in many different fields, including the natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, ecology, neuroscience, and physics, as well as technology and engineering fields such as image processing, signal processing, information theory, computer science, cryptography, and telecommunications. It is also used in finance, due to seemingly random changes in financial markets as well as in medicine, linguistics, music, media, colour theory, botany, manufacturing, and geomorphology. Etymology The word ''stochastic'' in English was originally used as a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birth–death Process
The birth–death process (or birth-and-death process) is a special case of continuous-time Markov process where the state transitions are of only two types: "births", which increase the state variable by one and "deaths", which decrease the state by one. The model's name comes from a common application, the use of such models to represent the current size of a population where the transitions are literal births and deaths. Birth–death processes have many applications in demography, queueing theory, performance engineering, epidemiology, biology and other areas. They may be used, for example, to study the evolution of bacteria, the number of people with a disease within a population, or the number of customers in line at the supermarket. When a birth occurs, the process goes from state ''n'' to ''n'' + 1. When a death occurs, the process goes from state ''n'' to state ''n'' − 1. The process is specified by birth rates \_ and death rates \_. Recu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macroevolution
Macroevolution usually means the evolution of large-scale structures and traits that go significantly beyond the intraspecific variation found in microevolution (including speciation). In other words, macroevolution is the evolution of taxa above the species level (genera, families, orders, etc.). Macroevolution is often thought to require the evolution of completely new structures such as entirely new organs. However, fundamentally novel structures are not necessary for dramatic evolutionary change. For instance, the evolution of mammal diversity in the past 100 million years has not required any major innovation. All of this diversity can be explained by modification of existing organs. In most cases, macroevolution cannot be observed directly because numerous mutations are required for large-scale changes. Hence specific methods are required to study and prove it. However, in rare cases single mutations can cause dramatic change and thus serve as models for macro-evolutionary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clade
A clade (), also known as a monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that are monophyletic – that is, composed of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants – on a phylogenetic tree. Rather than the English term, the equivalent Latin term ''cladus'' (plural ''cladi'') is often used in taxonomical literature. The common ancestor may be an individual, a population, or a species (extinct or extant). Clades are nested, one in another, as each branch in turn splits into smaller branches. These splits reflect evolutionary history as populations diverged and evolved independently. Clades are termed monophyletic (Greek: "one clan") groups. Over the last few decades, the cladistic approach has revolutionized biological classification and revealed surprising evolutionary relationships among organisms. Increasingly, taxonomists try to avoid naming taxa that are not clades; that is, taxa that are not monophyletic. Some of the relationships between organisms ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preferential Attachment
A preferential attachment process is any of a class of processes in which some quantity, typically some form of wealth or credit, is distributed among a number of individuals or objects according to how much they already have, so that those who are already wealthy receive more than those who are not. "Preferential attachment" is only the most recent of many names that have been given to such processes. They are also referred to under the names Yule process, cumulative advantage, the rich get richer, and the Matthew effect. They are also related to Gibrat's law. The principal reason for scientific interest in preferential attachment is that it can, under suitable circumstances, generate power law distributions. If preferential attachment is non-linear, measured distributions may deviate from a power law. These mechanisms may generate distributions which are approximately power law over transient periods. Definition A preferential attachment process is a stochastic urn process, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phylogeny
A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical or genetic characteristics. All life on Earth is part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry. In a ''rooted'' phylogenetic tree, each node with descendants represents the inferred most recent common ancestor of those descendants, and the edge lengths in some trees may be interpreted as time estimates. Each node is called a taxonomic unit. Internal nodes are generally called hypothetical taxonomic units, as they cannot be directly observed. Trees are useful in fields of biology such as bioinformatics, systematics, and phylogenetics. ''Unrooted'' trees illustrate only the relatedness of the leaf nodes and do not require the ancestral root to be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Push Of The Past
The push of the past is a type of survivorship bias associated with evolutionary diversification when extinction is possible. Groups that survive a long time are likely to have “got off to a flying start”, and this statistical bias creates an illusion of a true slow-down of diversification rate through time. Birth–Death modelling in evolutionary studies The evolutionary processes of speciation and extinction can be modelled with a stochastic “ birth–death model” (BDM), which is an important component in the study of macroevolution. A BDM assigns each species a certain probability of splitting (\lambda) or going extinct (\mu) per interval of time. This gives rise to an exponential distribution, with the number of species in a particular clade ''N'' at any time ''t'' given by N_= N_e^, although this expression only gives the expected value when N and t are large (see below). In the special case of there being no extinction, this simplifies to the so-called "Yule pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Null Hypothesis
In scientific research, the null hypothesis (often denoted ''H''0) is the claim that no difference or relationship exists between two sets of data or variables being analyzed. The null hypothesis is that any experimentally observed difference is due to chance alone, and an underlying causative relationship does not exist, hence the term "null". In addition to the null hypothesis, an alternative hypothesis is also developed, which claims that a relationship does exist between two variables. Basic definitions The ''null hypothesis'' and the ''alternative hypothesis'' are types of conjectures used in statistical tests, which are formal methods of reaching conclusions or making decisions on the basis of data. The hypotheses are conjectures about a statistical model of the population, which are based on a sample of the population. The tests are core elements of statistical inference, heavily used in the interpretation of scientific experimental data, to separate scientific claims fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crown Groups
In phylogenetics, the crown group or crown assemblage is a collection of species composed of the living representatives of the collection, the most recent common ancestor of the collection, and all descendants of the most recent common ancestor. It is thus a way of defining a clade, a group consisting of a species and all its Extant taxon, extant or extinct descendants. For example, Neornithes (birds) can be defined as a crown group, which includes the most recent common ancestor of all modern birds, and all of its extant or extinct descendants. The concept was developed by Willi Hennig, the formulator of cladistics, phylogenetic systematics, as a way of classifying living organisms relative to their extinct relatives in his "Die Stammesgeschichte der Insekten", and the "crown" and "stem" group terminology was coined by Dick Jefferies, R. P. S. Jefferies in 1979. Though formulated in the 1970s, the term was not commonly used until its reintroduction in 2000 by Graham Budd and Sö ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mass Extinctions
An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. It occurs when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the background extinction rate and the rate of speciation. Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from disagreement as to what constitutes a "major" extinction event, and the data chosen to measure past diversity. The "Big Five" mass extinctions In a landmark paper published in 1982, Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup identified five particular geological intervals with excessive diversity loss. They were originally identified as outliers on a general trend of decreasing extinction rates during the Phanerozoic, but as more stringent statistical tests have been applied to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
