This event is part of our ongoing Thursday Seminar Series.

Preview: Understanding why the tempo and mode of evolutionary change varies across the tree of life is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Phylogenetic comparative methods have emerged as one way to study this questions at the broadest, macroevolutionary scales. However, finding the right balance of model realism, complexity, and statistical power has proved to be a major challenge to making robust inferences. Here, I will show work in my lab that seeks to address this challenge by reframing macroevolutionary questions away from questions about rate variation, and to instead focus on how we define and measure characters themselves. I will argue that this reframing enables new links to biological knowledge and data that provide needed constraints on our models and enable new insights into the causes and consequences of macroevolutionary change.

Website: uyedalab.com