More on reticulation

[Una Smith]

STEPHEN MANNING wrote:

>                                              It's not my field, but I
>sometimes wonder whether a statistician could come up with, or has come up
>with, a mathematical model which would take into account reticulation in
>such a realistic way that it would often alter, based on probable
>paleopolyploidy, what is determined to be the most parsimonious
>cladogram.

Plenty of people have tried, and not gotten far.  Anyway, the goal
is to find the most parsimonious cladogram, *all else being equal*.
And the real debate is over what that "all else" should consist of.

Hybridization (aka recombination or reticulation) is a hard problem
also in HIV research, but perhaps the biggest problem at present is
the preliminary challenge of figuring out what is a hybrid and what
is not a hybrid.

        Una Smith

Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS K-710, Los Alamos, NM  87545