Graphing evolution
I do not know any scientists online (particularly bioinformaticians and statisticians) who do not love visualization: looking at it, talking about it, trying to make it.
But drafting charts and constructing visualizations of your data and results is no easy feat. Lyman (2009) plots out the understanding of evolutionary processes inherent in graphs made by archaeologists and paleontologists.
Paleobiologists adopted the view of a species as a set of phenotypically variant individuals and graphed those variations either as central tendencies or as histograms of frequencies of variants. Archaeologists presumed their artifact types reflected cultural norms of prehistoric artisans and the frequency of specimens in each type reflected human choice and type popularity. They graphed cultural evolution as shifts in frequencies of specimens representing each of several artifact types. Confusion of pattern and process is exemplified by a paleobiologist misinterpreting the process illustrated by an archaeological graph, and an archaeologist misinterpreting the process illustrated by a paleobiological graph. Each style of graph displays particular evolutionary patterns and implies particular evolutionary processes.
Lyman goes through a different kinds of charts and points out how they can be improved. An archeaologist, he finds the final plot (Fig 14) easier to interpret than the alternatives.
Figure 14 was originally designed to test the notion that not only does species richness increase as primary productivity increases but so too does intrataxonomic morphological or ecophenotypic diversity (Lyman and O'Brien, 2005). Indeed, the number of size classes in Fig. 14 is greatest when climates were relatively moist (strata I–IV, IX, XI–XII) and the number is least when climates were relatively dry (strata VI–VIII, XVI–XVII).
The problem with this chart is that it does not display the information about moist vs dry climate in different strata. How difficult would this be using Lyman's tools?
Lyman, R Lee. Journal of Human Evolution, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 18 December 2008.
