Bushes in the tree of life

Here we examine how the combination of the spacing of cladogenetic events and the high frequency of independently evolved characters (homoplasy) limit the resolution of ancient divergences. Because some histories may not be resolvable by even vast increases in amounts of conventional data, the ident...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS biology 2006-11, Vol.4 (11), p.e352-e352
Main Authors: Rokas, Antonis, Carroll, Sean B
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Bioinformatics/Computational Biology
Biological diversity
Classification - methods
Computational Biology
Endangered & extinct species
Evolution
Evolution, Molecular
Forecasts and trends
Genetic Variation - genetics
Genome
Genomes
Genomics
Hominidae - classification
Humans
Life
Origin
Paleontology
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Trees
Zoology
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Summary:Here we examine how the combination of the spacing of cladogenetic events and the high frequency of independently evolved characters (homoplasy) limit the resolution of ancient divergences. Because some histories may not be resolvable by even vast increases in amounts of conventional data, the identification of new molecular characters will be crucial to future progress. "... there is, after all, one true tree of life, the unique pattern of evolutionary branchings that actually happened. [...]molecular systematics must now move beyond conventional characters and mine genomic data for new, less-homoplastic characters such as RGCs [62].
ISSN:1545-7885
1544-9173
1545-7885
DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040352