In spite of sonic pessimistic attitudes towards methodology of economics, it has succeeded as a central theme in numerous books, refereed journals, international conferences and symposiums whose volume is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The proliferation of methodological literature also is accompanied by a proliferation of issues that concern: the goals of economics, realism of economics,...

In this paper, we introduce the HashRF(p, q) algorithm for computing RF matrices of large binary, evolutionary tree collections. The novelty of our algorithm is that it can be used to compute arbitrarilysized (p × q) RF matrices without running into physical memory limitations. In this paper, we explore the performance of our HashRF(p, q) approach on 20,000 and 33,306 biological trees of 150 ta...

Perfect phylogeny is one of the fundamental models for studying evolution. We investigate the following variant of the problem: The input is an n ×m species-characters matrix. The characters are binary and directed, i.e., a species can only gain characters. The difference from standard perfect phylogeny is that for some species the state of some characters is unknown. The question is whether on...

L. Vigilant et al. (1) recently presented "the strongest support yet for the placement of [their] common mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] ancestor in Africa some 200,000 years ago." This support stems from a tree estimated by maximum parsimony from mtDNA sequence data with the use of the computer program PAUP (2). The African origin is inferred from this tree because (i) the most basal splits are amon...