M Pagel

..A table of statistical and phylogenetic methods is presented...

..Our findings are consistent with social models of word change that emphasize the role of selection, and suggest that owing to the ways that humans use language, some words will evolve slowly and others rapidly across all languages...

..For many comparative questions of anthropology and human behavioural ecology, historical processes estimated from linguistic phylogenies may be more relevant than those estimated from genes...

..It now faces the challenge of finding order in the evolution of complex systems, including human society...

..Our hypothesis explains features of human hairlessness-such as the marked sex difference in body hair, and its retention in the pubic regions-that are not explained by other theories...

..The model is available from the authors' website, and can be used for the analysis of both nucleotide and morphological data...

..These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of animals' lives, suggesting in particular that many animals in these taxa will be found living at densities above the carrying capacity of their environments...

..Our estimates of return rates were generally well below the threshold for chaos, which makes it unlikely that chaotic dynamics occur in natural populations--one of ecology's key unanswered questions...

..We make the model available within a Bayesian Markov-chain Monte Carlo framework for phylogenetic inference, as an easy-to-use computer program...

..The ability to screen phylogenies for the node-density artifact is important for phylogenetic inference and for researchers using phylogenetic trees to infer evolutionary processes, including their use in molecular clock dating...

..We illustrate the methods with data on ribonuclease evolution in the Artiodactyla. Software implementing the methods (BayesMultiState) is available from the authors...

..Punctuational episodes of evolution may play a larger role in promoting evolutionary divergence than has previously been appreciated...

..Routine use of mixture models alongside other approaches to phylogenetic inference may often reveal hidden or unexpected patterns of sequence evolution and can improve phylogenetic inference...

..Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity...

..Speciation might often owe more to ephemeral and essentially arbitrary events that cause reproductive isolation than to the gradual and regular tug of natural selection that draws a species into a new niche...

..Phylogenetic methods identify pairs of proteins that co-evolve on a phylogenetic tree, and have been shown to have a high probability of correctly identifying known functional links...

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..Progress in understanding eukaryotes may come from identifying ancestral features such as the eukaryotic splicesome that could explain why this lineage invaded, or created, the eukaryotic niche...

..However, there are only so many ways to gall an oak, and rare shifts to new oak sections may contribute greatly to long-term diversification by opening up whole new adaptive zones...

..These genomic characteristics should be added to the list of attributes previously considered avian but now thought to have arisen in non-avian dinosaurs, such as feathers, pulmonary innovations, and parental care and nesting...

..Clearly, there are inherent limitations in using only data on extant species to infer correlates of extinction; however, this approach is potentially a powerful tool in analyzing correlates of speciation...

..We further examine the effect of constraining the ML model by fixing the rate of gene gain at a low value, rather than estimating it from the data...