Re: Avian origins: new analysis confirms ancient beginnings

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> If characters turn out to
> change state very frequently, namely outside the clade
> in question also, and especially if ecomorphological
> constraints are not readily apparent, one will
> immediately known that inference of the ancestral
> state *in* the clade in question is unreliable.

This will often work, but not always. It happens that a character is highly 
conserved or highly labile in a clade but not in its closest relatives. 
Sometimes there is no way to get a cheap answer, and a huge phylogenetic 
analysis is all that can be done.