Genome Prairie
Species are not evenly distributed among taxa

Scotland and Sanderson have found that the number of species per genus in higher organisms are strongly biased.

In many taxa, a few genuses have a large number of species, while most genuses have only one or a few species.

Dominance is defined as the fraction of  species/genus in the largest genus.

Relevance:

1. Distribution of species within taxa can serve as a baseline against which to measure database bias.

2. It's important to detect cases in which the dominant species in the database is NOT dominant in the taxonomy.

Figure 1 from Scotland RW, Sanderson MJ (2004) The Significance of Few Versus Many in the Tree of Life, Science 303:643.

    
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