Summary
Statistical techniques permit us to test the adequacy of representation of populations by trees and to distinguish between alternative evolutionary interpretations.
The representation of the relationships between populations by trees is one of the possible modes of graphic display of similarities between them. It is also a tool for the analysis of the process of their evolutionary divergence. Until recently there existed no direct way for testing the validity (“treeness”) of this mode of representing a specific set of populations. A method has been developed for this purpose (Cavalli-Sforza and Piazza, 1975; Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza, 1975) and tested by simulations (Astolfi et. a1.1978). The method tests the hypothesis of statistical independence in the evolution occurring in the tree branches after branching has occurred or, in biological words, the absence of evolutionary convergence, and hybridizations after branching. A hypothesis which is often introduced implicitly is that of constant evolutionary rates. If the treeness test shows the need to drop this rather restrictive hypothesis, it is still possible to use a less restrictive one -- of “variable” evolutionary rates -- but the assignment of a root to the tree on the basis of internal evidence alone is then invalid. In this paper, an example of application to a problem in human evolution and of the consequences of variable evolutionary rates will be discussed.
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Piazza, A., Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1983). Treeness Tests and the Problem of Variable Evolutionary Rates. In: Felsenstein, J. (eds) Numerical Taxonomy. NATO ASI Series, vol 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69024-2_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69024-2_46
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