Stochastic Mapping of Morphological Characters
Authors: Huelsenbeck J.P.1; Nielsen R.2; Bollback J.P.1
Source: Systematic Biology, Volume 52, Number 2, April 2003 , pp. 131-158(28)
Publisher: Taylor and Francis Ltd
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Abstract:
Many questions in evolutionary biology are best addressed by comparing traits in different species. Often such studies involve mapping characters on phylogenetic trees. Mapping characters on trees allows the nature, number, and timing of the transformations to be identified. The parsimony method is the only method available for mapping morphological characters on phylogenies. Although the parsimony method often makes reasonable reconstructions of the history of a character, it has a number of limitations. These limitations include the inability to consider more than a single change along a branch on a tree and the uncoupling of evolutionary time from amount of character change. We extended a method described by Nielsen (2002, Syst. Biol. 51:729-739) to the mapping of morphological characters under continuous-time Markov models and demonstrate here the utility of the method for mapping characters on trees and for identifying character correlation.Keywords: Bayesian estimation; character correlation; character mapping; Markov chain Monte Carlo
Document Type: Research article
Affiliations: 1: Section of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, Division of Biology, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0116, USA 2: Department of Biometrics, Cornell University, 439 Warren Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853-7801, USA
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