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.

Oaks systematics and complete plastome trees

We are living in the era of Big Data. You just need the money and/or workforce, and you drown in data. As consequence an increasing amount of researchers study complete plastomes of organisms, they have little idea about. The oaks (Quercus; beech family: Fagaceae) are becoming a prominent example.

A fully resolved, and perfectly misleading, species tree

The ultimate promise of phylogenomics is to get a fully resolved species tree: a tree, where the individuals finely sort per species, and where all branches, especially the deepest ones, have high or, better, unambiguous support. A look behind such a tree, Jiang et al.'s (2021) Tree of Beeches.

Caesar's EU, Hitler's EU, EU, future Xi's EU – all the same?

I got a comment to my Fare well Brittania! post drawing that line, which got me thinking. A reflection and response.

Are complete plastome trees always better? Maples, for instance.

With the advances in sequencing, it has become easy to compile complete chloroplast genomes (plastomes) for plants. Given you have the money and workforce. The People's Republic of China is rich in both; hence, gene banks fill up with complete plastomes of tree genera, otherwise ignored by the scientific world. Such as maples (Acer). Beware the fully resolved trees.

Wer will die 5%

Es wird haarig im Osten für die ehemalige Allmachtspartei CDU, die SPD in Brandenburg hat rechtzeitig rechtsgeblinkt. Gereicht hat es trotzdem nicht. Ein Kommentar zur 5%-Hürde, den vielbeschworenen stabilen Mehrheiten. Mit Grafiken natürlich.

Knackt endlich die Haselnuß!

Verfolgt man die z.T. etwas hysterischen Reaktionen auf Twitter zum Schmusekurs der Thüringer CDU mit den Schmuddelkindern der AfD (die in Thüringen besonders schmuddelig sind), fällt oft der Gedanke von "Wehret den Anfängen!". Ein Kommentar zur braunen Welle, die nun auch Deutschland erreicht hat.

Why you never should do a single-species plastid analysis of oaks

The fragmentation of science makes it more and more difficult to keep up scientific standards. Editors struggle harder and harder to find peers who have the knowledge and time to properly review the papers of others. Hence, in even relatively transparent peer-reviewed journals, the same errors are endlessly repeated. For instance: phylogenetic/-biogeographic studies on Chinese oaks using plastid data.

#FridayForFuture vs. #SamstagFreibadZumüllen

Eine der wichtigsten Institutionen einer funktionierenden Presselandschaft sind Leserbriefe. Und manche sind einfach zu gut, um sie hinter der Paywall der Lokalpresse verloren gehen zu lassen. Ein Abdruck (mit freundlicher Erlaubnis der Autorin).

Lösen die Grünen die SPD als Volkspartei ab?

... fragte die SZ dieser Tage und ludt zur Online-Diskussion ein (powered by Disqus). Mein Kommentar (hier mein Disqus-Profil) wurde dummerweise als "Spam" gekennzeichnet und nicht publiziert (bisher), vermutlich wegen den Links zum Political Compass (non-profit) und unserem Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks blog (wir verdienen auch kein Geld damit; es lebe die algorithmen-gestützte Zensur). Deswegen hier der Volltext (leicht verändert).

The grey zone between obvious and less obvious scientific crankery

A tweet pointed me to a post with an interesting title "How to spot palaeontological crankery" by Mark Witton which includes (in the second part) "10 Red flags and pointers for spotting crank palaeontology" for non-experts. As an expert, I cannot help but to note that most of the ten points also apply to proper palaeontological science as well.

There's no need to do what you can't

Modern science thrives on pretention. We can't just publish something interesting, we always feel compelled arguing why it's important and stress its ground-breaking novelty. On the other hand, everyone can use computers, and those computers can do fancy analyses provided you have some data. And they always get it right, so why should editors and reviewers bother about the results?

Cladistics vs Phylogenetics: What's the difference?

While working for a 2-piece post on the Genealogical World of Networks (A bit of heresy: networks for matrices used in Cladistics studies), I stepped over a threat on ResearchGate, where someone asked this. I browsed through the answers, and felt obliged to answer as well.

Miraculous reconstruction of palaeoaltitude and -temperature using the "Coexistence Approach"

It may look (to some) like a good idea to take modern-day altitudinal ranges of genera to infer a palaeo-altitude of a fossil plant assemblage using a mutually shared range approach. A fresh example from the purportedly peer-reviewed Elsevier journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (PPP).

Trivial but illogical – reconstructing the biogeographic history of the Loranthaceae (again)

In 2007, a short but nice paper by Vidal-Russell & Nickrent provided a scenario for the unfolding of the Loranthaceae, a plant family of mostly epiphytic tree parasites. Recently, they teamed up with a Chinese group (Liu, Le et al. 2018) to provide a new, and totally unexpected hypothesis.

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.

Age of angiosperms, may palaeobotany rest in peace (and pieces)

How old are the angiosperms? Very trivial to answer, more or less as old as all the other main lineages of living seed plants. Unless you define them in a particular way. And because you are who you are, no-one dares to criticise it. But thanks to predatory publishers, someone did. A tale about ivory towers, opinions presented as facts, the Impermeable Fog shrouding the Forest of Reviews, and the creeping death of palaeobotany. Although it could been the spark to ignite something beautiful.

How not to make a phylogeographic study

A citation alert pointed me to the paper of Zhang et al. (2017) to be published in Tree Genetics & Genomes, a failed attempt to make a biogeographic study on a small Ulmaceae genus: Zelkova. The severe concerns raised by at least one peer (not me) were largely ignored by the authors and the editor, providing us with a paper that managed to combine the most important pitfalls in (plant) biogeographic studies.