Refuting phylogenetic relationships.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Phylogenetic methods are philosophically grounded, and so can be philosophically biased in ways that limit explanatory power. This constitutes an important methodologic dimension not often taken into account. Here we address this dimension in the context of concatenation approaches to phylogeny.

Results

We discuss some of the limits of a methodology restricted to verificationism, the philosophy on which gene concatenation practices generally rely. As an alternative, we describe a software which identifies and focuses on impossible or refuted relationships, through a simple analysis of bootstrap bipartitions, followed by multivariate statistical analyses. We show how refuting phylogenetic relationships could in principle facilitate systematics. We also apply our me

SUBMITTER: Bucknam J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1574289 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature