The monophyly of plants and insects

I just received promotional information about a new book from Garland Science publishers. “Genome Duplication; concepts, mechanisms, evolution and disease” By Melvin L DePamphilis and Stephen D Bell. Garland Science Oct 2010 ISBN: 978-0-415-44206. It sounds like a great title, especially for someone like me who thinks genome and gene duplication are among the most…

Big Trees in the NY Times

The New York Times has an article talking about constructing and especially visualizing the tree of life called “Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life“. Its interesting, especially since I think it touches on many issues concerning tree size that even phylogenetic biologists haven’t really considered. There are lots of talk of “big” trees,…

Confident in your phylogeny?

There has been discussion and research for decades into support values for phylogenetic nodes and the relative quality of different phylogenies as a whole. Here is a new and impressive (although clearly subjective) criteria for confidence in a phylogenetic tree- “I am so confident in this tree I have had it tattooed onto my body”!!!The…