Whittemore et al. (1) find significant correlations between maximum life span (MLS) and telomere shortening rate (TSR) in mammalian and avian species. This interesting study comes to the conclusion that “critical telomere shortening and the consequent onset of telomeric DNA damage and cellular senescence are a general determinant of species life span.” An important issue, however, has not been dealt with by the authors. The use of linear regressions (those used by the authors) assumes that samples are independent, but this is not the case in interspecies studies. In fact, the samples (i.e., the values for each species) have different grades of dependency, which derive from their phylogenetic relationship (2). This is why all tests should be performed using phylogenetic corrections, like phylogenetic-independent contrast (3 …

中文翻译：

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关于端粒缩短率与寿命的相关性。

Whittemore等。（1）发现哺乳动物和鸟类的最大寿命（MLS）与端粒缩短率（TSR）之间存在显着的相关性。这项有趣的研究得出的结论是“关键的端粒缩短以及随之而来的端粒DNA损伤和细胞衰老的发作是物种寿命的普遍决定因素。” 但是，作者尚未处理一个重要问题。使用线性回归（作者使用的线性回归）假设样本是独立的，但在种间研究中并非如此。实际上，样本（即每个物种的值）具有不同的依赖性等级，这取决于它们的系统发育关系（2）。这就是为什么应该使用系统发育校正来执行所有测试的原因，例如与系统发育无关的对比（3…