New preprint led by grad student, Yu Mo! We introduce new software to calculate evolutionary rates of quantitative characters in the presence of discordance
Our paper shows that Spinney is much more accurate than using just one tree (usually the species tree), when you want to calculate one rate, test for multiple rates, or even get a more accurate picture of ancestral states.
New preprint led by grad student, Yu Mo! We introduce new software to calculate evolutionary rates of quantitative characters in the presence of discordance
Altschul et al. provide a weigh to take a phylogenetically weighted average, so that (for instance) the fact that there are so many small rodent species doesn't skew the answer.
I have no idea why they were working on this, but presumably it's related to their work on BLAST
Have you ever wanted to answer a question like "do mammals weigh more than reptiles?" or "are male insects bigger than female insects?"
If so, you would presumably get a bunch of measurements and take their average. But biological data is correlated due to phylogeny! So it's not so simple
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This paper started because @fabiology.bsky.social and I had found that parsimony *was* consistent under the MSC (in 2018), at least for rooted 4-taxon trees. I thought maybe this would always be the true.
But no--Daniel showed definitively this is not the case. Glad that was cleared up!
Scientists, DON'T USE LaTeX UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, DON'T GIVE LaTeX TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON, BREAK UP THE .tex DOC INTO THREE TOTALLY SEPARATE DOCS (NOT MIXED!), TAKE [Underfull \vbox (badness 10000) has occurred]
