Luke Harmon

Abstract Phylogenetic comparative methods are a broad suite of approaches for studying trait and species diversification using evolutionary trees. In spite of their substantial growth in sophistication and complexity in recent years, among the most commonly-employed phylogenetic comparative method continues to be a simple measure of the evolutionary correlation between variables, while accounting for the statistical non-independence in our data that arises from common descent.

Orlando Schwery Department of Biology, University of Idaho, Moscow, 83844 Idaho, USA New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, 87544 New Mexico, USA Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, 24061 Virginia, USA Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 70803 Louisiana, USA Contribution: Formal analysis, ​Investigation, Methodology, Writing - review & editing Search for more papers by this author

Abstract Phylogenetic comparative methods are now widely used to measure trait evolution on the tree of life. Often these methods involve fitting an explicit model of character evolution to trait data and then comparing the explanatory power of this model to alternative scenarios. In this article, we present a new model for discrete trait evolution in which the rate of character change in the tree varies from edge (i.e., "branch") to edge of the phylogeny according to a discretized Γ distribution.