Bush of life: using gene trees (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 12, 2013, 14:44 (4184 days ago) @ David Turell

It doesn't work well, using genes to design evolutionary tree relationships:-"For some researchers, the idea of selectively excluding data from analysis could take some getting used to. "For many years, the biggest problem for people trying to understand relationships between organisms was getting enough data," said Jeffrey Townsend, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, who was not involved in the study. "The community has always been taught to get the data, so it's reasonable that's how they thought about the problem."
 
While evolutionary biologists have been grappling with these issues for years, the new study is the largest-scale effort to date to explore the level of conflict among individual genes. "People will have two reactions: There is a lot more conflict than I thought, and we need to do a better job of analyzing it," said Donoghue, who is interested in applying the new method in his own work. However, he also points out that it's difficult to confirm the accuracy of the new approach. Even though the revised tree matched one built using alternative genetic information, the latter may harbor its own inaccuracies. "I am not so sure we know what the true relationships are," he said. "If we aren't sure what the truth is, we can't tell if we have the right tree.""-https://www.simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/a-new-approach-to-building-the-tree-of-life/0/