| During the last few years, many models have been proposed to link microevolutionary processes to macroevolutionary patterns, defined by comparative data analysis. Among these, Brownian motion and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (O-U) processes have been used to model, respectively, genetic drift or directional selection and stabilizing selection. These models produce different curves of pairwise variance between species against time since divergence, in such a way that different profiles appear in phylogenetic correlograms. We analyzed variation in body length among 19 species of South American owls, by means of phylogenetic correlograms constructed using Moran's I coefficient in four distance classes. Phylogeny among species was based on DNA hybridization. The... |
