A Primer of Phylogenetic Procedures

To order by phone call 913-864-4540. MasterCard and VISA accepted. See the inside back cover for a list of other available numbers in this series. ® Word, and figures were drafted in Claris TM MacDraw ® II. The publication was then designed and typeset in Aldus PageMaker ® and forwarded to the printer. he that hopes to be a good Angler must not onely bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the Art it self; but having once got and practis'd it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove like Vertue, a reward to it self. " Piscator speaking to Venator and Auceps The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton The Modern Library Printing of the Fourth (1668) Edition Random House, New York iii iv PREFACE In writing this workbook, we have strived to follow in the tradition of Brooks et al. (1984) of providing a guide to basic phylogenetic techniques as we now understand them. The field of phylogenetics has undergone many changes, some philosophical and some empirical, in the last 10 years. We hope to reflect some of these changes in this workbook. The workbook is arranged in a manner roughly functional and pedagogical. The sophisticated reader, for example, might question why we spend so much time with exercises (in Chapter 2) that do not really reflect the way " real " phylogenetic analysis is performed or why so much space is given to Hennig Argumentation and Wagner algorithms (Chapter 4) when they are either not a part of modern computer algorithms or, at best, are only a starting point for finding the best hypothesis of common ancestry for the particular data analyzed. Our answer, perhaps constrained by our own histories, is that this approach seems to help at least some students learn phylogenetics. Because we can only touch on the most basic topics and provide exercises for only a few of these, we invite the student to explore the original literature; we have cited sources in the body of the text and called attention to some papers in the " Chapter Notes and References " sections at the end of each chapter. The absence of a paper in the text or in the " Notes " section is no reflection on the worth of …