What Europe's electorate wants: full speed towards the abyss

The people of the European Union, representing the last standing big chunk of democracy that fully deserves the name (demos = common people, kratos = power/strength), have once more cast their vote. And sent a brown wave across the continent into their common parliament. Are we tired of common wealth and freedom? Some more than others. A quick overview.

Previously published facts a.k.a. branching artefacts

Via a ResearchGate citation alert, I got pointed to a paper by Klak et al. (2020) in PhytoTaxa erecting a new monotypic genus within the Drosanthemeae. I have literally no idea about these plants, but I (obviously in contrast to Klak et al.) now their genetics. A tale of persistent ignorance among renown plant systematicists.

Big Data = No Brain? Pt. 2: Digging deeper

Having being ignored by phylogeneticists for over a decade, maples [GE:Wikipedia/The Maple Society] – the second-most diverse extratropical angiosperm tree genus of the Northern Hemisphere – have come into focus again. And going Big Data. In part 2 of this longread, we'll dig out the little precious information, usually ignored in phylogenomic, "big pattern" analyses.

Big Data = No Brain? Pt. 1: Complete plastomes vs 500+ nuclear genes

Having being ignored by phylogeneticists for over a decade, maples [GE:Wikipedia/The Maple Society] – the second-most diverse extratropical angiosperm tree genus of the Northern Hemisphere – have come into focus again. And going Big Data. Time to sum up what we can learn from the new phylogenomic studies and trees. Which is actually a lot, although the interesting bits are to a large degree ignored by those producing the phylogenomic data; despite (or: because) being published in Q1-journals.

How predatory is MDPI? Or: The 50 shades of scientific grey

There's an ever-growing grey zone between clearly predatory and legit publishers/ journals. The still exploding number of MDPI journals belong to the shady bunch. Why else would they ask a science drop-out to join the editorial board of Life – the life science journal?

ML, MP, NJ – what's the difference?

In 2015, somebody on ResearchGate posted the following question: “What's the difference between neighbor joining, maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony, and Bayesian inference?” Many answered, a few were ok but a lot repeated common misconceptions. A necessary correction and some further remarks.

Just a single, easily overlooked tip

One thing about phylogenomic studies in the Era of Big Data is that we easily tend to overlook what is new and interesting. Why it may be worth to give each subtree in a phylogenomic tree a closer look