That was exactly my reasoning, too.
Iâm surprised, but then I direct you to Harshman J., Huddleston C.J., Bollback J., Parsons T.M., Braun M.J. True and false gharials: A nuclear gene phylogeny of Crocodylia. Systematic Biology 2003; 52:386-402. You can easily find it on Researchgate.
So I have confirmed an office hours with @TedDavis for August 12-13. Does anyone want to host one of the other ones suggested here?
What about Josh Denny? Iâd be really interested to learn more about All of Us, especially privacy concerns, the role of AI, and the future of tailored therapies.
I would be happy to host one approaching phylogenetics by looking at the example of the croc paper I cited above.
@Jordan I think itâs gonna be hard to get josh to agree.
@John_Harshman can you write a brief summary to prep everyone and decide on when youâd like to do it?
I will admit I donât know quite what this âoffice hoursâ thing entails. The brief summary would be the paper itself. I would hope that people might read it and ask about any bits they donât understand. We could start with the abstract:
âThe phylogeny of Crocodylia offers an unusual twist on the usual molecules versus morphology story. The true gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) and the false gharial (Tomistoma schlegelii), as their common names imply, have appeared in all cladistic morphological analyses as distantly related species, convergent upon a similar morphology. In contrast, all previous molecular studies have shown them to be sister taxa. We present the first phylogenetic study of Crocodylia using a nuclear gene. We cloned and sequenced the c-myc proto-oncogene from Alligator mississippiensis to facilitate primer design and then sequenced an 1,100-base pair fragment that includes both coding and noncoding regions and informative indels for one species in each extant crocodylian genus and six avian outgroups. Phylogenetic analyses using parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian inference all strongly agreed on the same tree, which is identical to the tree found in previous molecular analyses: Gavialis and Tomistoma are sister taxa and together are the sister group of Crocodylidae. KishinoâHasegawa tests rejected the morphological tree in favor of the molecular tree. We excluded long-branch attraction and variation in base composition among taxa as explanations for this topology. To explore the causes of discrepancy between molecular and morphological estimates of crocodylian phylogeny,we examined puzzling features of the morphological data using a priori partitions of the data based on anatomical regions and investigated the effects of different coding schemes for two obvious morphological similarities of the two gharials.â
So here is a thread setup for you to engage with people: John Harshman: The Phylogeny of Crocodiles.