Data from: Loss of sexual recombination and segregation is associated with increased diversification in evening primroses

We infer that net diversification rates (speciation minus extinction) in functionally asexual evening primrose lineages are roughly eight times faster than diversification rates in sexual lineages, largely due to higher speciation rates in asexual lineages. We further reject the hypothesis that a loss of recombination and segregation is irreversible because the transition rate from functional asexuality to sexuality is significantly greater than zero.and in fact exceeded the reverse rate.

These results provide the first empirical evidence in support of the alternative theoretical prediction that asexual populations should instead diversify more rapidly than sexual populations because they are free from the homogenizing effects of sexual recombination and segregation. Although asexual reproduction may often constrain adaptive evolution, our results show that the loss of recombination and segregation need not be an evolutionary dead-end in terms of diversification of lineages.

Usage notes

Onagraceae TREEBASE file ML_analyses This zip directory gives the BiSSE maximum likelihood analyses reported in Table S3. MCMC_analyses This zip directory gives the full MCMC results and the R code that generated the data underlying Figure 3, Figure S1, Figure S3, Table 1, and Table S2.