have suggested that there are important weaknesses of gene tree parsimony in reconstructing phylogeny in the face of gene duplication, weaknesses that are addressed by method of uninode coding. Here, we discuss Simmons and Freudenstein's criticisms and suggest a number of reasons why gene tree parsimony is preferable to uninode coding. During this discussion we introduce a number of recent deve...

The parsimony score of a character on a tree equals the number of state changes required to fit that character onto the tree. We show that for unordered, reversible characters this score equals the number of tree rearrangements required to fit the tree onto the character. We discuss implications of this connection for the debate over the use of consensus trees or total evidence and show how it ...

Phylogenetic networks are used to display the relationship of different species whose evolution is not treelike, which is the case, for instance, in the presence of hybridization events or horizontal gene transfers. Tree inference methods such as Maximum Parsimony need to be modified in order to be applicable to networks. In this paper, we discuss two different definitions of Maximum Parsimony ...

Different analytical methods can yield competing interpretations of evolutionary history and, currently, there is no definitive method for phylogenetic reconstruction using morphological data. Parsimony has been the primary method for analysing morphological data, but there has been a resurgence of interest in the likelihood-based Mk-model. Here, we test the performance of the Bayesian implemen...

The relationship between phylogenetic accuracy and congruence between data partitions collected from the same taxa was explored for mitochondrial DNA sequences from two well-supported vertebrate phylogenies. An iterative procedure was adopted whereby accuracy, phylogenetic signal, and congruence were measured before and after modifying a simple reconstruction model, equally weighted parsimony. ...