Opportunity Begets Opportunity to Drive Macroevolutionary Dynamics of a Diverse Lizard Radiation

2024 · doi:10.32942/x2cs4g
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This study disentangled macroevolutionary dynamics in Pleurodonta lizards, finding that viviparity's diversification effect is linked to Andean mountains, and larger body size promotes diversification only in specific settings.

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The paper investigates why diversification rates vary unevenly across lineages, using a multi-method framework focused on Pleurodonta lizards to capture context-dependency in macroevolutionary dynamics. By comparing effects across phylogenetic scales, it finds that lineage-wide signals can change or disappear when conditioned on sub-lineages—for example, viviparity is associated with faster diversification but its effect size is overestimated due to confounding with Andean mountain history, and mountain occurrence affects diversification specifically in the Andes rather than speciation rates in general. It also reports that increases in body size catalyze diversification only under particular ecological and geographic contexts. The authors caution that conventional models fitting whole trees can misattribute diversification heterogeneity to factors that are not plausible, highlighting confounding rather than true causal drivers. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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Abstract

Evolution proceeds unevenly across the tree of life, with some lineages accumulating diversity more rapidly than others. Explaining this disparity is challenging as similar evolutionary triggers often do not result in analogous shifts across the tree, and similar shifts may reflect different evolutionary triggers. We used a combination of approaches to directly consider such context-dependency and untangle the complex network of processes that shape macroevolutionary dynamics, focusing on Pleurodonta, a diverse radiation of lizards. Our framework shows that some lineage-wide signatures are lost when conditioned on sub-lineages: viviparity appears to accelerate diversification but its effect size is overestimated by its association with the Andean mountains. Conversely, some signals that erode at broader phylogenetic scales emerge at shallower ones. Mountains in general do not affect speciation rates; rather, the occurrence in the Andean mountains specifically promotes diversification. Likewise, the evolution of larger sizes catalyzes diversification rates, but only within certain ecological and geographical settings. We caution that conventional methods of fitting models to entire trees may mistakenly assign diversification heterogeneity to specific factors despite evidence against their plausibility. Our study takes a significant stride toward disentangling confounding factors and identifying plausible sources of ecological opportunities in the diversification of large evolutionary radiations.
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Abstract

Evolution proceeds unevenly across the tree of life, with some lineages accumulating diversity more rapidly than others. Explaining this disparity is challenging as similar evolutionary triggers often do not result in analogous shifts across the tree, and similar shifts may reflect different evolutionary triggers. We used a combination of approaches to directly consider such context-dependency and untangle the complex network of processes that shape macroevolutionary dynamics, focusing on Pleurodonta, a diverse radiation of lizards. Our framework shows that some lineage-wide signatures are lost when conditioned on sub-lineages: viviparity appears to accelerate diversification but its effect size is overestimated by its association with the Andean mountains. Conversely, some signals that erode at broader phylogenetic scales emerge at shallower ones. Mountains in general do not affect speciation rates; rather, the occurrence in the Andean mountains specifically promotes diversification. Likewise, the evolution of larger sizes catalyzes diversification rates, but only within certain ecological and geographical settings. We caution that conventional methods of fitting models to entire trees may mistakenly assign diversification heterogeneity to specific factors despite evidence against their plausibility. Our study takes a significant stride toward disentangling confounding factors and identifying plausible sources of ecological opportunities in the diversification of large evolutionary radiations. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2CS4G Subjects Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Keywords

viviparity, Andes, Body size, reptiles, Diversification., Andes, body size, reptiles, Diversification Dates Published: 2024-01-18 22:53 License CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Additional Metadata Data and Code Availability Statement: All data used in this study were gathered from publicly available databases and the sources are provided in the Methods section. Codes written for this project will be available on GitHub https://github.com/Munoz-Lab upon acceptance. Language: English

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