- The rapid accumulation of information from diverse sources – such as cheap sequencing and growing community databases, together with improvements in computational speed – has fueled a growth in increasingly complex models in many fields, including macroevolutionary biology.
- Despite the rate of increase in data accumulation, temporal, taxonomic, and other data gaps will always exist.
- It has become apparent that macroevolutionary models are often impossible to distinguish, even with huge volumes of data.
- A way out of this quandary is to use independent information across disciplines to limit plausible models and to constrain parameters.