Comparing rates of molecular and morphological evolution identifies multiple speciation trajectories in a diverse radiation of skinks.

There is increasing recognition that the process of species divergence is not uniform across the tree of life, and that newly diverged taxa may differ in their levels of phenotypic and genetic divergence. We investigate the relationship between phenotypic and genetic differentiation across the speciation continuum using sister pairs from a large ecologically diverse radiation of Australian skinks, the Tribe Eugongylini, a high-quality alignment of genomic sequence data, and morphometric data for 90 lineages across the radiation. Based on the framework proposed by Struck et al.

Islands are engines of language diversity.

Islands have played a prominent role in evolutionary and ecological theory, centring the theoretical framework for understanding biodiversity in terms of isolation and area and providing 'laboratories' of evolutionary change and adaptive radiation. However, a similar role for islands in understanding global language diversity has not been established, even though one-sixth of the world's languages are spoken on islands which account for <1% of the inhabited land area. The striking diversity of island languages remains largely unexplained.

Combining Molecular, Macroevolutionary, and Macroecological Perspectives on the Generation of Diversity.

Charles Darwin presented a unified process of diversification driven by the gradual accumulation of heritable variation. The growth in DNA databases and the increase in genomic sequencing, combined with advances in molecular phylogenetic analyses, gives us an opportunity to realize Darwin's vision, connecting the generation of variation to the diversification of lineages. The rate of molecular evolution is correlated with the rate of diversification across animals and plants, but the relationship between genome change and speciation is complex: Mutation rates evolve in response to life history and niche; substitution rates are influenced by mutation, selection, and population size; rates of acquisition of reproductive isolation vary between populations; and traits, niches, and distribution can influence diversification rates.