Klaus Schliep wrote:
> There is quite some irony that in phylogenetic reconstruction often
> non-ultrametric methods are preferred, even though the time to the
> last common ancestor (LCA) should be for each extend species the same.
> However other fields use heavily ultrametric methods (hclust) even
> there exist no evident equivalent property like the LCA.
The irony, such as it is, is due to the fact that we can only see amounts of
difference, not amounts of time, and, darn it, different organisms have
different biologies so they change at different rates. Which makes biology
more interesting but makes molecular change less clocklike.
Joe
----
Joe Felsenstein j...@gs.washington.edu
Department of Genome Sciences and Department of Biology,
University of Washington, Box 355065, Seattle, WA 98195-5065 USA
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