REU: Correlated Evolution of Continuous Traits: A Simulation Study

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Comparative studies form a major part of modern biology. Typically, several species are compared with regard to two or more traits, such as brain size and body size, limb length and running speed, or dentition and diet. Significant associations between traits generally are inferred by applying standard statistical tests. Unfortunately, standard tests are not appropriate for comparative studies. This is so because species do not represent statistically independent data points. Recently, several methodologies have been proposed which take the non-independence of species values into account and hence allow appropriate statistical tests for evolutionary relationships between continuous traits. These methods make explicit use of the known evolutionary (phylogenetic) relationships among species. The proposed research compares the statistical efficacy of several such methods by determining how well they perform in the analysis of computer-simulated data with known properties.