Beyond Reasonable Doubt? A Test for Common Ancestry

[evograd (Blogging Graduate Student)]

@pnelson

Rather, the authors assumed that some tree (i.e., branching pattern of common ancestry) unites the taxa in question. The research challenge therefore is to find the true, or best, tree of relationships. But the geometry or topology they are seeking will (they take this as given) resemble a branching pattern with a single root. Data that do not yield such a pattern will be seen as “phylogenetically uninformative.”

In cases where there is some obvious reticulation, for example, it’s evidenced by quite a bit more than “there are some heterogenous GC sites that produce inconsistent trees”. In other words, I think there can be good evidence for a non-tree-like phylogeny, but the sequences removed from the analysis in that paper wouldn’t cut it.