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.

Not that it get's lost – my comment to a (nice) dating of Dravidian languages

Twitter pointed me to a recent dating paper of Dravidian languages by Kolipakam et al. (2018), published with Royal Society Open Science. I'm not a linguist but I found it very interesting. But while other comments are waved through, mine is still on hold for now over 24h. Here it is.

What I was not allowed to show #2: Networks explaining molecular evolution in wax plants

Thanks to the confidentiality of the review system, experimental research that goes beyond the standard applications may be lost to the Impermeable Fog. In this post, I'll will show several reconstructions I made for a paper of a colleague on Hoya (Asclepioideae), the wax plants.

Two papers you may want to read before inferring trees from morphological (or other) data

In this post, I'll advertise two probably undercited papers published in 2004 by Richard H. Zander regarding “Minimal values of reliability of Bootstrap and Jackknife proportions, Decay index, and Bayesian posterior probability”, and Matthew Spencer and co-workers on the “Phylogenetics of artificial manuscripts”. Two papers that should have been read by anyone trying to infer trees from morphological data including fossil taxa, or non-trivial data in general.