Why extinction estimates from extant phylogenies are so often zero

Why are case-time estimates so often off?

Why Are Estimates of Agricultural Supply Response so Variable?

Estimates of the response of agricultural supply to movements in expected price display curiously large variation across crops, regions and time periods. We argue that this anomaly may be traced, at least in part, to the statistical properties of the commonly-used econometric estimator, which has infinite moments of all orders and may have a bimodal distribution. We propose an alternative minim...

Why are estimates of global isoprene emissions so similar ( and why is this not so for monoterpenes ) ?

1 Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystems Analysis, Geobiosphere Science Centre, Lund University Sölvegatan 12, 223 62, Lund, Sweden 2 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Cooperative Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 9 80309, USA 3 Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Kreutzwa...

Why are clicks so exclusive ?

Clicks occur abundantly in the languages of southern Africa, but are not found anywhere else. This is unexpected since the clicks seem to be both auditorily salient and easy to produce. This paper suggests that the reason for the areal skewness of clicks lies in the African phonetictypological environment rather than in production or perception constraints. In particular, clicks are limited to ...

Quantifying Age-dependent Extinction from Species Phylogenies.

Several ecological factors that could play into species extinction are expected to correlate with species age, i.e., time elapsed since the species arose by speciation. To date, however, statistical tools to incorporate species age into likelihood-based phylogenetic inference have been lacking. We present here a computational framework to quantify age-dependent extinction through maximum likeli...