Birth-Death Models in Macroevolution

Abstract

Birth-death models, and their subsets—the pure birth and pure death models—have a long history of use for informing thinking about macroevolutionary patterns. Here we illustrate with examples the wide range of questions they have been used to address, including estimating and comparing rates of diversification of clades, investigating the “shapes” of clades, and some rather surprising uses such as estimating speciation rates from data that are not resolved below the level of the genus. The raw data for inference can be the fossil record or the molecular phylogeny of a clade, and we explore the similarites and differences in the behavior of the birth-death models when applied to these different forms of data.