Lucy in Newsweek

[Richard Jensen]

> My memory of phenetics (which I learned from Gary Schnell back in the
> Pleistocene) contained no assumptions of clock-like rate, which would be
> hard to measure with morphology anyway.

Some years ago, Don Colless suggested that under certain circumstances
phenograms were quite likely to be good estimates of phylogeny; he noted that
rates of evolution need not be "clock-like" but that differences in rates
between nodes in a clade should not vary appreciably (in fact, if I recall
correctly correctly, he also noted that if the rates were uniform, the lengths
internodes of the phenogram could be interpreted as units of time).

Dick

--
Richard J. Jensen              | tel: 574-284-4674
Department of Biology      | fax: 574-284-4716
Saint Mary's College         | e-mail: rjensen at saintmarys.edu
Notre Dame, IN 46556    | http://www.saintmarys.edu/~rjensen