Bivalve growth and the invisible hand of heterogeneity

Abstract

A recent study by Saulsbury and colleagues assessed factors influencing growth coefficients in bivalves. Like many macroevolutionary studies that cover a wide range of taxa and environments, this study fails to account for important heterogeneity among taxa and among environments. Rankings of factors depend on the range of values sampled, patterns of allocation of energy to various competing functions, and whether taxa in any given clade are uniform in their growth coefficients. Heterogeneity is universal and must be taken into account in large-scale analyses.