Identifying the factors that influence species diversification is fundamental to our understanding of the evolutionary processes underlying extant biodiversity. Behavioural innovation, coupled with the social transmission of new behaviours, has been proposed to increase rates of evolutionary diversification, as novel behaviours expose populations to new selective regimes. Thus, it is believed that behavioural flexibility may play an important role in driving evolutionary diversification across animals. We test this hypothesis within the primates, a taxonomic group with considerable among-lineage variation in both species diversity and behavioural flexibility. We employ a time cut-off in our phylogeny to help account for biases associated with recent taxonomic reclassifications and compare three alternative measures of diversification rate that consider different phylogenetic depths. We find that the presence of behavioural innovation and social learning are positively correlated with diversification rates among primate genera, but not at shallower phylogenetic depths. Given that we find stronger associations when examining older rather than more recent diversification events, we suggest that extinction resistance, as opposed to speciation, may be an important mechanism linking behavioural flexibility and primate diversification. Our results contrast with work linking behavioural flexibility with diversification of birds at various phylogenetic depths. We offer a possible dispersal-mediated explanation for these conflicting patterns, such that the influence behavioural flexibility plays in dictating evolutionary trajectories differs across clades. Our results suggest that behavioural flexibility may act through several different pathways to shape the evolutionary trajectories of lineages.

中文翻译：

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行为灵活性在灵长类动物多样化中的作用

确定影响物种多样化的因素是我们理解现存生物多样性背后的进化过程的基础。行为创新与新行为的社会传播相结合，已被提议提高进化多样化的速度，因为新行为将人群暴露于新的选择性制度。因此，据信行为灵活性可能在推动动物进化多样化方面发挥重要作用。我们在灵长类动物中测试了这一假设，灵长类动物是一个在物种多样性和行为灵活性方面具有相当大的谱系间差异的分类群。我们在我们的系统发育中使用了一个时间截止点，以帮助解释与最近的分类学重新分类相关的偏差，并比较考虑不同系统发育深度的多样化率的三种替代措施。我们发现行为创新和社会学习的存在与灵长类动物属的多样化率呈正相关，但在较浅的系统发育深度上则不然。鉴于我们在检查较旧而不是最近的多样化事件时发现更强的关联，我们认为与物种形成相反，灭绝抗性可能是将行为灵活性和灵长类动物多样化联系起来的重要机制。我们的结果与将行为灵活性与不同系统发育深度的鸟类多样化联系起来的工作形成对比。我们为这些相互冲突的模式提供了一种可能的分散介导的解释，这样行为灵活性在决定进化轨迹方面的影响在不同的进化枝中是不同的。我们的研究结果表明，行为灵活性可能通过几种不同的途径来塑造谱系的进化轨迹。