The extent to which evolutionary processes affect the shape of phylogenetic trees is an importantopen question. Analyses of small trees seem to detect non-trivial asymmetries which are usually ascribedto the presence of correlations in speciation rates. Many models used to construct phylogenetic trees havean algorithmic nature and are rarely biologically grounded. In this article, we analyze the topologicalproperties of phylogenetic trees generated by different evolutionary models (populations of RNA sequencesand a simple model with inheritance and mutation) and compare them with the trees produced by knownuncorrelated models as the backward coalescent, paying special attention to large trees. Our results demon-strate that evolutionary parameters as mutation rate or selection pressure have a weak influence on thescaling behavior of the trees, while the size of phylogenies strongly affects measured scaling exponents.Within statistical errors, the topological properties of phylogenies generated by evolutionary models arecompatible with those measured in balanced, uncorrelated trees.
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