What is Incomplete Lineage Sorting?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@pevaquark

Thanks for the clarification, though probably most who think of a single couple bottleneck don’t think any evidence of a larger population size in an ancient shared ancestry is that interesting anyways.

Pretty much. I’m just not sure how this important in the larger conversation except for confusing people who think (or argue) evolution must produce perfect trees.

@pnelson

If one claims, as you do, that a fully consistent nested hierarchy exists, supported by multiple consilient lines of evidence, then the actual published conflicts in molecular data, described by Brown (in the webinar linked above) should not occur.

Except, we expect that when several species branch off a single lineage in a “short” amount of time, there will be ILS, which means they will not be in a perfect tree. We expect there to be conflicts with a perfect tree.