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Re: More on the genus problem



 As far as I know, a "transformed" cladist would think it different.

So what? Are there any such people left in the world? :-)

 Although the phylogenetic tree may be appreached with cladistic
 methodology, we have no certainty that parsimony prevailed in
 evolution.

1) That's why maximum likelihood and Bayesian analysis -- extensions of parsimony that take more factors into account -- were developed. Indeed, parsimony is more prone to long-branch attraction than they are. 2) However, parsimony fares better in simulation studies when the speeds of evolution of too many different nucleotides are different ("heterotachy"). 3) Also, parsimony doesn't have a problem with missing data as long as a few informative cells remain, while likelihood and Bayesian analysis run into great trouble according to a simulation study in the Systematic Biology issue of February.

 As far as I understood, we use parsimony because the resulting scheme
 have maximal information content.

I don't see how a cladogram produced using parsimony contains more information than one produced using likelihood or Bayesian analysis. But these didn't even exist yet in 1979. I bet Farris was talking about how a phylogenetic tree contains more information about phylogeny than a classification does... which is... like... not surprising.