Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 268, Issue 1481, Pages 2123-2130Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2001.1769
Keywords
cladistics; phylogeny; fossil record; stratigraphy; tree
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Phylogenies, or evolutionary trees, are fundamental to biology. Systematists have laboured since (lie time of Darwin to discover the tree of life. Recent developments in systematics, such as cladistics and molecular sequencing, have led practitioners to believe that their phylogenies are more testable now than equivalent efforts from the 1960s or earlier. Whole trees, and nodes within trees, may be assessed for their robustness. However, these quantitative approaches cannot be used to demonstrate that one tree is more likely to be correct than another. Congruence assessments may help. Comparison of a sample of 1000 published trees with an essentially independent standard (dates of origin of groups in geological time) shows that the order of branching has improved slightly, but the disparity between estimated times of origination from phylogeny and stratigraphy has, if anything, become worse. Controlled comparisons of phylogenies of four major groups Agnatha, Sarcopterygii, Sauria and Mammalia) do not show uniform improvement, or decline, of fit to stratigraphy through the twentieth century. Nor do morphological or molecular trees differ uniformly in their performance.
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