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

Artkonzepte, in Bildern

Biodiversität, die Artenvielfalt, ist in aller Munde. Grundlage zum Messen der Biodiversität, ist fast immer (noch) die Anzahl der in einem Gebiet gefundenen Arten. Aber was ist eine Art? Ein paar Bildchen. Und Beispiele.

Scientia-ex-machina: explicit biogeographic inferences and the phylogenomic age

The nice thing about huge datasets is that they can give quick results, often trivial to interpret. In phylogenomics: a fully resolved, unambigously supported phylogenetic tree. The not-so-nice thing is that downstream analyses using these fully resolved trees, such as ancestral area analyses, may be utter nonsense because the experimental set-up was fundamentally flawed to start with. A post-review of Areces-Berazain et al. (2021), including the results from Li et al. (2019) and Yu et al. (2022).

Searching for a research object? Why not maples!

In course of my career as a professional scientist, I had to leave a lot of threads open. Mainly, because I need to make sure to fund my own position, which consumed 80–90% of the money the mighty research councils granted me. One easy pick for those that have money to do molecular research are the western Eurasian super-species of Acer sect. Acer.

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.

Monophyletic species

Probably the most common line one can read in phylogenetic papers scratching at the surface of evolution is "species xxx is not monophyletic" or "supports species yyy as monophyletic". While appearing to be trivial, clade = monophylum, such statements are often naive, too often incomprehensive or, occasionally, just wrong. A clarification.

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.

Die Wahl der Qual

In meinem Heimatland steht mal wieder das 4-jährliche Abnicken der Legislative an: die Bundestagswahl 2021. Wieder mal Zeit, den Wahl-O-Mat der bpb zu visualisieren, und in allgemeineren Kontext zu stellen.

Wahl der (H)Ampelmännchen

Diesen Sonntag wird in meinen beiden Heimatländern gewählt: Rheinland-Pfalz (meinem Geburtsland) und Baden-Württemberg (meinem Zweitland, bevor die DFG mich ins schwedische Exil schickte). Zeit die Wahl-O-Maten der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung zu vernetzen.

Where have all the Mondays gone

Who likes Mondays? Probably no-one, really. Thus, inspired by a tweet of a fellow Monday-victim and two great classics, a songtext.

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.

How to pimp up a palaeobotanical monograph

I got a request via ResearchGate to give feedback to a recently published palaeobotanical monograph. I'd love to, but I can't, really; I'm simply not qualified. But I can give some tips how to enrich a description of a palaeoflora to put palaeobotany in a better light.

Palynology from A to Z: People

Five of my palynology advertising tweets (have/will) introduce(d) researchers pushing forward the importance of palynology in contemporary organismal science. With four, I worked, and we published a good deal of papers including some pretty unique ones, which hopefully will provide templates for future cross-disciplinary research.

Palynology from A to Z: A as in Aponogeton

One thing, full-blood scientists usually forget, is to advertise their work. Usually because they lack the time. I have plenty and started a series of daily threads on Twitter advertising palynological research. But my reach there is miniscule and the half-life of tweets is extremely short. Hence, this post series.