Abstract
The convergence of advances in phylogenetics, fossil discoveries, and bioinformatic tools has opened exciting avenues in macroevolution over the last decade. Nonetheless, investigating what happened in the deep past remains challenging and must be approached with caution, including in the words perhaps used sometimes too liberally. We suspect that this is what motivated a recent letter to the editor (1) using our investigation of the Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution on the diversification dynamics of ants (2) as an alleged example of a “disturbing trend to confuse opportunity with cause and to assign ‘drivers’ (or causal conditions) to correlations, often without invoking mechanistic justification.”