27 June 2016

Making trees, or; The triumph of molecules


One more quick observation from the Evolution meeting in Austin last week.

Every tree of relationships between species I saw was based on molecular data.

This interested me, because there was a point where there was controversy about whether DNA data could be used to make phylogenies. I seem to remember articles that argued that relationships based on morphological data would generally be superior to those from DNA.

Now, I wonder if the tables have turned so much that if you put up tree based on morphological data instead of molecular data if people would look at it funny. (There would be a few exceptions, obviously, like fossil data.)

Photo by Extremely Tropical on Flickr; used under Creative Commons license.

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