Comparative analysis: Recent developments and uses with parasites

In the last three decades, comparative analysis across species has been widely used to uncover patterns of correlated evolution among traits, or between phenotypic traits and environment (i.e. adaptation). The seminal paper by Felsenstein in 1985 has at the same time clarified the need to account for phylogeny in cross-species analyses, and proposed a (still widely used) method to do so; i.e. independent contrasts. Since then, many biological models have been explored and several new methods have been proposed (see Freckleton, 2009). Under that impulse, phylogenetic dependency has also been considered for correcting the measure of biodiversity and more recently has been applied in community ecology.