Is south-western Western Australia a centre of origin for eastern Australian taxa or is the centre an artefact of a method of analysis? A comment on Hakea and its supposed divergence over the past 12 million years

Abstract

Lamont et al. (2016) concluded that the Australian sclerophyllous genus Hakea (Proteaceae) arose 18million years ago in the South West of Western Australia (SWA) and dispersed 18 times to eastern (EA) and central Australia (CA) only 12million years ago (mid-Miocene). Their explanation of the biogeographic history of Hakea was based on the following: accepting a fully resolved molecular phylogenetic tree, although ∼40% of nodes had posterior probability values below 0.95; using all nodes including geographically paralogous nodes to determine ancestral area probabilities; and applying a strict clock to estimate clade divergence times. Our re-analyses of the same dataset using a relaxed clock m..