[Taxacom] quote of the week

[Brian O'Meara]

On Mar 20, 2008, at 3:19 PM, John Grehan wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Brian O'Meara [mailto:omeara.brian at gmail.com]
> Sometimes
>> alignment IS hard and leads to ambiguous or even erroneous results,
>
> As in the orangutan case.
>
> John Grehan

The point of the dataset, which included orangutan sequence, was that  
alignment was NOT hard in that case. Try looking at it. If the  
results from a tree search with this dataset are different than your  
favorite tree (they were in a quick tree search), it is NOT due to  
difficulty in alignment. Thousands of characters recovered without a  
particular tree in mind reject a tree inferred from one particular,  
hand-crafted dataset; one could advance several arguments to justify  
the minority view, but it's a disservice to anyone who reads taxacom  
to continue to advance hand-waving arguments that are demonstrably  
not true.

Just FYI for all: based on quickly grepping the archives, it appears  
that this human-orang discussion has appeared in 32 of the last 54  
months on taxacom. I don't think many minds have changed over that  
time, but I think it's at least worth checking that the arguments  
advanced are potentially valid.

Brian O'Meara