TACKLING CAUSALITY IN PALEONTOLOGY WITHOUT A TIME MACHINE (Invited Presentation)

There are pervasive, general morphological, taxonomic and ecological trends, as well as clade-specific dynamics of waxing and waning in the fossil record. Patterns of speciation, origination and diversification and morphological evolution are being documented with better models and ever-increasing amounts of data. However, it is very challenging to attribute these patterns to causes and mechanisms, beyond verbal hypotheses and simple correlational models. Here, I give a very brief overview of methods that have been use in paleontology to tackle (Granger) causality, including Information Transfer, Convergent Cross Mapping and linear Stochastic Differential Equations. I present case studies based on linear SDEs and discuss current and future challenges in tackling causality without a time machine.