New bird genomic study, Stiller et al 2024, fails too often

Stiller et al 2024 reported,
“Despite tremendous efforts in the past decades, relationships among main avian lineages remain heavily debated without a clear resolution.”

Correction: the LRT provides clear resolution and includes fossil taxa.

That’s because
only trait analysesm like the LRT, incorporate fossils and recovers tenable, measurable interrelationships. This one, another genomic test, continues to nest chickens with ducks. This marks this study as a total waste of time for the 52 co-authors So far, no deep time genomic analysis for any vertebrate clade has recovered tenable results. This one also nested grebes with flamingos with doves + cuckoos nearby. The authors also recovered a clade ‘Afroaves‘ (owls + toucans). None of these are tenable on the face of it.

Rather than going back to the drawing board, or testing vs traits, these authors published their results in Nature. And referees accepted this. Deep time studies based on DNA have been corrupted by natural influences over time. Gene studies should recover cladograms similar to trait studies, but they can only do that in subsets and segments. Too often they shuffle together dissimilar taxa, making them fodder for Creationists to attack evolution… and for good reason!

The problem is
sometimes genomics gets it right. Unfortunately, too often genomics gets things wrong. Use traits. They are testable, measurable and ultimately unassailable. If an amateur figured this out seven years ago, the academic community is now the culprit spreading misinformation and myth.

Trust genes to find errant fathers and hiding criminals. Don’t trust genes to separate chickens and ducks.

Figure 1. Cladogram from Stiller et al 2024. Some bird interrelationships are correct here. The others are untenable. ” data-image-caption=”

Figure 1. Cladogram from Stiller et al 2024. Some bird interrelationships are correct here. The others are untenable.

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Figure 1. Cladogram from Stiller et al 2024. Some bird interrelationships are correct here. The others are untenable.

Here
the large reptile tree (LRT, 2312 taxa) bird ancestors go back to Cambrian worms and fish. All tested bird taxa look like each other. They have to, because this is a trait-based analysis. Here flamingos (Phoenicopterus) nest with similar seriemas, not with dissimilar grebes.

References
Stiller et al (51 co-auithors) 2024. Complexity of avian evolution revealed by family-level genomes. Nature online PDF

Molecules vs. morphology in bird phylogeny: Prum et al. 2015 part 3

Publicity
https://www.popsci.com/science/bird-evolution-wrong/