Happy Wonderer

Oops, Van, I think you left in too much context. Gotta get better with the context clipping if you want to make it into the big time...

Do you understand that this means that as we get more data what was controversial in the past has been resolved? Technology has made it possible to sequence more of each "critter's" genome, which reduces the uncertainty of the phylogenies.

Here is an analogy. Suppose it is the first day of school and the kindergarten kids have nametags. You are a bus driver trying to get them home. Alas, it rains and makes some of letters on the nametags illegible. The three kids left have lastnames of "McBRIDE", "McBeade", and "SOMRIDE".

Great. But the tags are munged. If all you have is three nametags of

_ _ _ R _ D E
M _ B _ _ _ E
_ _ _ R _ D E

you are going to have to hope that the parents are home in order to get the kids to the right parents. Tag one could be either "MCBRIDE" or "SOMRIDE", etc. However, if you look at the tags more closely and see

S _ _ R _ D E
M _ B E _ _ E
_ _ _ R _ D E

you know exactly that you have "SOMRIDE", "McBEADE", and "McBRIDE"

In the first case you had competing phylogenies, with the addition of more information they become more clear. That is why we had more competing "phylogenies" when the technology had less resolution. (Of course this is a gross oversimplificaton; it isn't really an ancesteral tree, we need larger nametags and a discussion of statistical probabilites to make it better, but I think you get the point...?)


HW

[ September 14, 2002: Message edited by: Happy Wonderer ]

[ September 14, 2002: Message edited by: Happy Wonderer ]</p>