Rekindling Jeannel’s Gondwanan vision? Phylogenetics and evolution of Carabinae with a focus on Calosoma caterpillar hunter beetles

For almost a decade now, a team of molecular evolutionists has produced a plethora of seemingly precise molecular clock estimates for divergence events ranging from the speciation of cats and dogs to lineage separations that might have occurred approximately 4 billion years ago. Because the appearance of accuracy has an irresistible allure, non-specialists frequently treat these estimates as factual. In this article, we show that all of these divergence-time estimates were generated through improper methodology on the basis of a single calibration point that has been unjustly denuded of error. The illusion of precision was achieved mainly through the conversion of statistical estimates (which by definition possess standard errors, ranges and confidence intervals) into errorless numbers. By employing such techniques successively, the time estimates of even the most ancient divergence events were made to look deceptively precise. For example, on the basis of just 15 genes, the arthropod-nematode divergence event was 'calculated' to have occurred 1167+/-83 million years ago (i.e. within a 95% confidence interval of approximately 350 million years). Were calibration and derivation uncertainties taken into proper consideration, the 95% confidence interval would have turned out to be at least 40 times larger ( approximately 14.2 billion years).

We investigate a neutral model for speciation and extinction, the constant rate birth-death process. The process is conditioned to have \(n\) extant species today, we look at the tree distribution of the reconstructed trees-- i.e. the trees without the extinct species. Whereas the tree shape distribution is well-known and actually the same as under the pure birth process, no analytic results for the speciation times were known. We provide the distribution for the speciation times and calculate the expectations analytically. This characterizes the reconstructed trees completely. We will show how the results can be used to date phylogenies.