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Glossary of terms used in Phylogeny Reconstruction.
Felsenstein Joe
Felsenstein, University of Washington invented the Bootstrap resampling
procedure, made the observation that parsimony could be inconsistent when
long and short branches were present on a tree and also constributed to
the popularisation of ML methods for phylogeny reconstruction. He
has also been the principal author of the PHYLIP package.
Felsenstein Zone This
is the phenomenon of 'long branch attraction'. If a dataset has some
taxa that have long branches leading to the terminal tips (leaves),
and some other branches (both external and internal) that are short, then
the long branches will attract each other and appear as sister taxa on
the tree, even if they do not share recentness of common ancestry.
Felsenstein identified this phenomenon as a deficiency of the Maximum
Parsimony method of phylogeny reconstruction, although it is known that
all methods can be misleading in such circumstances. The problem
with the felsenstein zone is that as more and more data is collected, confidence
in the incorrect relationships becomes stronger. This is one
of a number of systematic biases.
Fitch (1) Walter Fitch,
evolutionary biologist responsible for defining the fitch character type,
which is an unordered, non-additive character type, with equal costs for
all changes. It is a suitable character type for both molecules and
morphology. This was later generalised by David Sankoff to allow
unequal costs for changes. (2) The name of a program in the PHYLIP
package.
Choose the first letter of your term.
A | B | C
| D | E | F
| G | H | I
| J | K | L
| M | N | O
| P | Q | R
| S | T | U
| V | W | X
| Y | Z
Any
Questions? email: James Mcinerney
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