Phylogenetic Trees for Vertebrate Species Predicted by an Irreversible Markov Process

A new Markovian method for the prediction of phylogenetic trees has been developed earlier by the authors. Here, the method is illustrated and applied using mitochondrial DNA data for vertebrate species (and technicalities of the theory are avoided). Discussions include the sensitivity of the results to DNA alignment techniques and the inclusion of polytomy in tree structures. Several comparisons are made with tree structures in the literature which have been predicted using statistical techniques.