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Inferring Phylogenies

  • Author: Joseph Felsenstein
  • Sinauer Associates, 2004
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Chapter 1: Parsimony methods

  • One of the earliest methods of inferring phylogenies are parsimony methods. Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza (1963) declared that the preferred evolutionary tree is the one that involves ‘the minimum net amount of evolution’.
  • In other words, we seek the phylogeny within which the fewest events occur while reconstructing the series of evolutionary events.

A simple example

  • Assume we have 5 species, each of which ahs been scored for 6 characters. Each character can only have 2 states: 0 or 1.
  • An event only allows a change in a character state from 0 –> 1 or 1 –>0.
  • The initial state at the root node can be either state 0 or state 1.
  • To find the most parsimonious tree, we must have a way of calculating how many changes of state are needed on a given tree. Suppose that someone proposes the phylogeny shown in Figure 1.1 (p. 2). The dataset is small enough in this example such that one can just “eyeball” the best reconstruction of evolution.

Chapter 2: Counting evolutionary changes

Chapter 3: How many trees are there?

Chapter 5: Finding the best tree by branch and bound

Chapter 6: Ancestral states and branch lengths

Chapter 7: Variants of parsimony

Chapter 8: Compatibility

Chapter 9: Statistical properties of parsimony

Chapter 10: A digression on history and philosophy

Chapter 11: Distance matrix methods

Chapter 12: Quartets of species

Chapter 13: Models of DNA evolution

Chapter 14: Models of protein evolution

Chapter 15: Restriction sites, RAPDs, AFLPs, and microsatellites

Chapter 16: Likelihood methods

Chapter 17: Hadamard methods

Chapter 18: Bayesian inference of phylogenies

Chapter 19: Testing models, trees, and clocks

Chapter 20: Bootstrap, jackknife, and permutation tests

Chapter 21: Paired-sites tests

Chapter 22: Invariants

Chapter 23: Brownian motion and gene frequencies

Chapter 24: Quantitative characters

Chapter 25: Comparative methods

Chapter 26: Coalescent trees

Chapter 27: Likelihood calculations on coalescents

Chapter 28: Coalescents and species trees

Chapter 29: Alignment, gene families, and genomics

Chapter 30: Consensus trees and distances between trees

Chapter 31: Biogeography, hosts, and parasites

Chapter 32: Phylogenies and paleontology

Chapter 33: Tests based on tree shape

Chapter 34: Drawing trees

Chapter 35: Phylogeny software