Phylogenies can be used to predict future diversification but with limited success

Abstract

Understanding the processes leading to the emergence of new lineages is one of the major tasks of macroevolution as a scientific field. Multiple commonly used models and metrics allow to estimate the rates of species diversification at the tips of phylogenetic trees, and are thus potentially useful for predicting future evolutionary success of individual extant lineages. However, the predictive performance of these methods has never been tested with real-world data. Here we use a new approach to quantify the relationship between predictor tip rates and subsequent diversification rates derived from a probability distribution of numbers of daughter species. We explore if and how well the tip-rate methods predict near-future diversification using temporal slices across large fossil and extant tetrapod phylogenies. We find that tip rate estimates from these methods do predict diversification in all four extant and one out of three fossil phylogenies. The quality of these predictions varies across the tested methods, with the model-free approach being more robust overall but likelihood-based models delivering correctly scaled diversification rates. Our results suggest that future cladogenesis can be predicted using existing tip rate methods, but only moderately well and likely dependant on factors that are difficult to evaluate in practical applications.