I'd like to make sure this can be easily understood by rank laypeople.
herebedragons writes:
A
phylogeny is a hypothesis about the evolutionary history of a group of taxa...
About "phylogeny," is this the way biologists actually use the term? I'm asking because when I look "phylogeny" up in the dictionary it seems like the above could be more easily understood if it were phrased like this: "A
phylogenetic tree is a
specific hypothesis about the evolutionary history of a group of taxa..."
Thus, the various phylogenetic methods have been developed to provide researchers with ways to evaluate those hypotheses and determine which hypothesis is the best.
A natural objection might be that selecting the best among a bunch of poor hypotheses is not of much value. What tells us that the better hypotheses have a fair chance of being true? You go on to describe some evaluation criteria like optimality, but giving a name to a criteria in this case explains little.
For example, if a phylogeny of 20 taxa were presented based on 200 nucleotide characters optimized by parsimony,..
"Nucleotide characters" means groups of three nucleotides that program for amino acids? Or do just mean individual nucleotides?
However, if those same taxa were evaluated using 5000 nucleotide characters from 4 genes optimized by maximum-likelihood with bootstrap support values >90%...
You might be descending into jargon here.
I don't have time now to tackle your next post.
-- | Percy |
| EvC Forum Director |