Patterns, processes, abduction, and consilience

In a recent blog post, David emphasized how important it is to distinguish patterns from processes in evolutionary biology, with phylogenetic analysis concentrating on the description of patterns (and not on the direct investigation of processes. David's major point is that we need to be careful to not forget about the logical limitations of our approaches:

In the world of logic, propositions cannot be converted; and yet converting propositions is exactly what is done by all descriptive data analyses.

As David correctly points out, in phylogenetic analysis, we tend to observe a pattern (some similarity between different species or languages, for example), and use this pattern to conclude that a specific process has happened (eg. the languages are so similar that we think they are identical).

Given that this problem is also important in historical linguistics, I want to share some thoughts from a linguistic perspective. Most of these were elaborated much earlier, in my PhD dissertation; and if you have read the original chapter (List 2014: 51-57), what I write below may seem repetitive. I have also alluded to these ideas in a couple of previous posts: What we know, what we know we can know, and what we know we cannot know; and Killer arguments and the nature of proof in historical sciences.

However, it is worthwhile to elaborate on these thoughts here, as David's comments are extremely interesting for historical sciences in general, and I think they deserve a more proper discussion across different disciplines.

Ontological fact and epistemological reality

The basic pattern/process problem may be even more complex than it is in evolutionary biology. In quite a few branches of science, most prominently in the historical and social sciences, even the object of investigation is not directly accessible to the researcher. All researchers can do is to try to infer the research object with the help of tests. In historiography we infer the res gestae by comparing direct and indirect (usually written) sources (Schmitter 1982: 55f). In psychology, attributes of people, such as "intelligence" cannot (yet) be directly measured but have to be inferred by measuring how they are "reflected in test performance" (Cronbach and Meehl 1955: 178).

The same holds for ancestors in historical linguistics and evolutionary biology. All we can do in order to examine whether some languages or species share a specific kind of ancestry is comparing them systematically, trying to identify patterns that provide evidence for close relationship. Given that we lack direct evidence of its existence, the ancestral languages or species we infer through comparison cannot be treated like an ontological fact but only as an epistemological reality (Kormišin 1988: 92). We address what psychologists call the construct, that is, the "fiction or story put forward by a theorist to make sense of a phenomenon" (Statt 1981/1998), not the "real" object.

Abduction as our sole mode of logical reasoning

In historical linguistics, we can address our research objects only via constructs, and so we have to rely on abduction as our sole mode of logical reasoning (Anttila 1972: 196f). The term abduction was originally coined by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and refers, as opposed to induction and deduction, to a "mode of reasoning [...] in which rather than progressing 'logically' [...], one infers an antecedent condition by heuristic guessing from a present case" (Lass 1997: 334). In Peirce's word:

Accepting the conclusion that an explanation is needed when facts contrary to what we should expect emerge, it follows that the explanation must be such a proposition as would lead to the prediction of the observed facts, either as necessary consequences or at least as very probable under the circumstances. A hypothesis then, has to be adopted, which is likely in itself, and renders the facts likely. This step of adopting a hypothesis as being suggested by the facts, is what I call abduction. I reckon it as a form of inference, however problematical the hypothesis may be held. (Peirce 1931/1958: 7.202)

Due to the specific aspects of knowledge we are given in the historical sciences, abduction is the only mode of reasoning that we can employ. According to Peirce (ibid.: 2.623), all three modes of reasoning, induction, deduction, and abduction, "involve the triad of 'rule', 'case' and 'result', but inference moves in different directions" (Lass 1997: 334). While induction infers a rule from a situation in which one is given case (initial situation) and result, deduction infers a result from a situation in which one is given case and a rule. Abduction, however, starts from a result (or a pattern in David's words) and a rule from which we try to infer a case.

As an example, consider the problem of language evolution. Given two languages with no written records of their previous history, we may observe as a pattern (or result) that they show striking systematic regularities in terms of sound correspondences. Given that we know, that — as a rule — languages change their sound systems slowly over time, we can conclude that the initial situation, the case, was that the two languages were once a single language. There is no way we employ any other mode of reasoning here, as long as we start from individual languages (or species) whose past we want to understand and describe.

We can think of situations in which we try to induce rules in historical linguistics, for example, when dealing with the development from Latin into its descendant languages, where we could ask about the individual processes of sound change (or sound change rules) by which the former was transformed into the latter. We can also think of situations in which we try to decide results from rules and initial situations, for example when trying to predict unobserved cognate words in languages that have not yet been completely documented by fieldwork (Bodt et al. 2018), by applying rules of sound change (or sound correspondences) to aligned cognate sets (List, forthcoming). But the big bulk of our work in historical linguistics (and also in evolutionary biology) works only via abduction: given a result (a pattern / observation in the present), we use our knowledge of rules and processes to infer an ancestral state.

Problems of reasoning based on abduction

According to Schurz (2008), different patterns of abduction can be distinguished, depending on: (1) "the kind of hypothesis which is abduced", (2) "the kind of evidence which the abduction intends to explain", and (3) "the beliefs or cognitive mechanisms which drive the abduction" (ibid.: 205). The kind of abduction that is commonly used in historical linguistics and evolutionary biology belongs to the family of factual abductions, that is, abductions in which "both the evidence to be explained and the abduced hypothesis are singular facts" (ibid.: 206). Since we mainly deal with unobservable facts (ie. constructs), we can further characterize it as historical-fact abduction (ibid.: 209).

The problem of historical-fact abduction is not necessarily that what we are try to "observe" lies in the past, but more importantly, that — due to the logic underlying abduction as a mode of reasoning — we usually have to infer both the rules and the initial situation from the patterns we observe. Given (as David emphasized) that a pattern can result from different processes, our inference of a specific, individual historical fact requires that we decide on a specific, individual process at the same time. Given that we have to infer both the process and initial state at the same time, it is not surprising that our inferences about the past are often so vague, and may easily change so quickly, specifically in a situation where we can't just travel back in time to see whether we were right.

In contrast to David, who suggested that we cannot directly investigate processes in the evolutionary sciences, however, I think that in we still can indirectly, be it with help of experiments, with simulations, or in those cases where we are lucky enough to find history documented in sources. These cases where we can study processes, however, are — and here I agree completely with David — not what we normally do in our research. What we usually do is investigating patterns and trying to infer both the process and the original state by which the patterns can be explained.

Cumulative evidence

The problem of abduction, in general (or historical-fact abduction, in specific), is to make sure that we protect ourselves from giving in to wild speculations. That we are not necessarily good at doing so is reflected in the numerous debates in historical linguistics, and evolutionary biology, where scholars at times invoke completely contrary scenarios explaining the past based on identical patterns. In addition, in historical linguistics, people often do not even agree regarding the patterns they believe can be observed in the data.

Earlier, in my dissertation (List 2014), I identified two aspects that I deem important in order to minimize the speculative aspect of our research, claiming that historical-fact abduction should be based on: (1) unique hypotheses, and (2) cumulative evidence. That we need unique hypotheses may seem self-evident at first sight, since it seems to be silly to claim that a certain pattern could be explained by a range of processes. Looking back at this point now, however, I tend to see this less strictly. In fact, I think that I would even prefer it if scholars would list all potential (individual) processes that may seem likely to have yielded a pattern, instead of focusing only on one possibility (and disregarding alternative solutions). Since we are not doctors who need to heal our patients as quickly as possible, we can afford a certain amount of doubt in our research.

Regarding the second point, what I had in mind earlier was that it is best if we have multiple results or different patterns (observed for the same species or languages under investigation) that can all be explained by the same hypothesis. In order to justify the claim that one specific hypothesis explains the evidence better than any alternative hypotheses, we can profit from combining multiple pieces of evidence that might "[fall] short of proof [when taking] each item separately" but become convincing when "all the items [are] combined" (Sturtevant 1920: 11).

Being forced to rely on multiple pieces of evidence (that only when taken together allow one to draw a rather convincing picture of the past) is not a unique problem of historical linguistics and evolutionary biology, but also of historiography – and even crime investigations, as was pointed out by Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-1893, cf. Gabelentz 1891: 154), and in later work on semiotics (cf. the papers in Eco and Sebeok 1983). The fact that historical linguistics theories are built about cases (events, unique objects), as opposed to theories about general laws, may also be the reason for the philological "style" prevalent in historical linguistic studies. I also believe that it is due to the complex nature of the inference process that a systematization of our methods has never been carried out efficiently.

While, for example, we can claim (at least to some degree) that the identification of cognate words in historical linguistics can be systematized (and even to some extent automatized, List et al. 2017), we are at a loss when it comes to systematizing the methods that we use to determine whether words have been borrowed or not. Instead of using one single method, we use a whole range of indicators, and only take borrowings for granted if at least a few of them point into the same direction (List 2018).

Consilience and conclusion

In a talk by James McInerney, held in 2015 in Paris (presenting an overview of his research as reflected in part in McInerney et al. 2014), I realized that the question of "cumulative evidence", which I had thought would have been discussed only in linguistic circles, belongs to a larger complex of discussions about consilience, as opposed to the Popperian tradition that claims that knowledge in science can only advance via falsification and the identification of general laws, as opposed to singular facts (Popper 1945: Chapter 25:II). We find this view, that we need to employ cumulative evidence when trying to infer individual facts, clearly stated in the work of William Whewell (1794-1866), who originally introduced the term consilience:

The Consilience of Inductions [ie. abductions] takes place when an Induction obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs. (Whewell 1840: 469)

As far as I understand from James McInerney's talk, the idea of consilience has long been disregarded in the historical sciences but is now gaining popularity (also thanks to the influential book by Wilson 1998). Although at first I felt delighted when I realized that I was not alone with the problem that I had called "cumulative evidence", based on the old book by Sturtevant (1920), I have to admit that I still do not really know what to do with this information, as it is extremely hard to operationalize the concept of consilience. When confronted with numerous different pieces of evidence, how can we identify the hypothesis that explains them all? How can we compare two opposing hypotheses that each convincingly explain some but not all the data? How can we arrive at an objective weighting of our evidence, based on its importance?

What is clear to me is that a "probabilistic evaluation of causes and elimination of implausible causes plays a central role in factual abductions" (Schurz 2008: 207), since it reduces the search space when seeking an explanation for a given phenomenon (ibid.: 210f). But it is not clear how to arrive at such an evaluation when dealing with patterns in practice. For the time being, thinking and discussing about consilience seems interesting; but until we find ways to operationalize it, it will just remain a nice idea without any concrete value for our scientific endeavors. I dearly hope that this won't be the case.

References

Anttila, R. (1972) An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics. Macmillan: New York.

Bodt, T., N. Hill, and J.-M. List (2018) Prediction experiment for missing words in Kho-Bwa language data. Open Science Framework Preregistrations .evcbp., 7 pp. [Preprint, under review, not peer-reviewed]

Cronbach, L. and P. Meehl (1955) Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin 52: 281-302.

Eco, U. and T. Sebeok (1983) The sign of three. Indiana University Press: Bloomington.

Gabelentz, H. (1891) Die Sprachwissenschaft. Ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. T.O. Weigel: Leipzig.

Kormišin, I. (1988) Prajazyk. Bližnjaja i dal’njaja rekonstrukcija [The proto-language. Narrow and distant reconstruction]. In: Gadžieva, N. (ed.) Sravnitel’no-istoričeskoe izučenie jazykov raznych semejTeorija lingvističeskoj rekonstrukcii [Theory of linguistic reconstruction]. 3. Nauka: Moscow, pp. 90-105.

Lass, R. (1997) Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

List, J.-M. (2014) Sequence comparison in historical linguistics. Düsseldorf University Press: Düsseldorf.

List, J.-M., S. Greenhill, and R. Gray (2017) The potential of automatic word comparison for historical linguistics. PLOS One 12: 1-18.

List, J.-M. (2018) Automatic methods for the investigation of language contact situations. [Preprint, under review, not peer-reviewed]. URL: http://lingulist.de/documents/papers/list-2018-automatic-methods-for-the-investigation-of-language-contact.pdf

List, J.-M. (forthcoming) Automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages. Computational Linguistics 45: 1-24.

McInerney, J., M. O’Connell, and D. Pisani (2014) The hybrid nature of the Eukaryota and a consilient view of life on Earth. Nature Reviews Microbiology 12: 449-455.

Peirce, C. (1931/1958) The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.

Popper, K. (1945) The open society and its enemies. Routledge: London.

Schmitter, P. (1982) Untersuchungen zur Historiographie der Linguistik. Struktur — Methodik — theoretische Fundierung. Gunter Narr: Tübingen.

Schurz, G. (2008) Patterns of abduction. Synthese 164: 201-234.

Statt, D. (1998) Consice dictionary of psychology. Routledge: London and New York.

Sturtevant, E. (1920) The pronunciation of Greek and Latin. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Whewell, W. (1847) The philosophy of the inductive sciences, founded upon their history. John W. Parker: London.

Wilson, E. (1998) Consilience: the unity of knowledge. Vintage Books: New York.

A jolly, holly network ... of Christmas carols

Today is Christmas Eve. What could be more befitting for our merry blog than to show a network of Christmas carols?

The perfect result would, of course, be a snowflake-like network. Ideally, approaching what is called a "stellar dendrite snowflake".

Stellar dendrites. (Images from a post
introducing a snowflake book:
The Snowflake.)

The data

I browsed the internet for lyrics of Christmas carols, and then scored their content in the form of a binary matrix.

The "taxon set" includes 45 traditional and (more) modern carols, some of them listed here, along with some others I remembered and sought out (eg. here). A comprehensive list of traditional carols can be found here, but using this would have made the matrix much too large for a post on Christmas Eve. (If you are reading this before Christmas, you might be spending too much time on science.) A rule of thumb is that a matrix should always have at least as many (completely defined) characters as taxa.

The 45 (hohoho!) "characters" include:

• length (short = 0, long = 1), and tone (merry = 0, darkish = 1)
• topics it is about / relates to / mentions — e.g. the birth scene, love, and yuletide (the latter included because as a naturalized Swede, I love the jultiden, fancy julkaffe, and much enjoyed most of my julbord);
• major Christmas figures — Jesus, angels, drummers, elves, Jack Frost, the Grinch, milking maids, monsters, Santa Claus, shepherds, snowmen, the Wise Men from the Orient;
• mentioned animals, such as reindeer, and plants, including the Christmas tree (traditionally a Tannenbaum – fir tree), and (very important for Anglosaxons who don't kiss each other whenever they meet, like we do in France) the mistletoe
• last but not least, Christmas related objects — non-living things such as bells, Christmas food, harps, sleighs, snow, stars, and presents.

The network

The result is not a perfect stellar dendrite, but it is close enough.

A Neighbor-net of Christmas carols. Stippled terminal edges are reduced by factor 2.

It has quite a nice circular sorting of the carols, each related in some way to the ones next to it. The only oddly placed one is "Twelve Days of Christmas", which is a very peculiar one (and my English, favorite), along with the rather content-free "We wish You a Merry Christmas".

Finally, as a Christmas treat, the "great voices of the British public" singing (and reflecting on) my favorite carol: a Creature Comforts Christmas special.

A merry Christmas to everyone!

And please try out some networks during the coming year.

Using phylogenetic networks to prove new results about trees

By Steven Kelk and Simone Linz.

Many readers of this blog will be aware that phylogenetic tree space is often traversed using topological modification moves such as SPR (Subtree Prune and Regraft) and TBR (Tree Bisection and Reconnection). In a nutshell these moves allow us to step from one phylogenetic tree to another, with a view to finding “good” phylogenetic trees. A natural question which arises is this: what is the minimum number of SPR or TBR moves required to turn one tree into another? Being able to compute these values – known as the SPR distance and the TBR distance respectively – gives us some feeling about how long it will take, deterministically or stochastically, to move from one part of tree space to another. Unfortunately, it is NP-hard (i.e. formally intractable) to compute SPR or TBR distances.

Game over? No because NP-hardness is never a reason to give up! In 2001 Allen and Steel [1] showed the following. Suppose you have two trees, T1 and T2, both on n taxa, and they have TBR distance k. After applying common subtree and common chain reduction rules, you obtain two trees – also with TBR distance k – which have at most 28k taxa. The striking thing here is that n vanishes from the analysis. Hence, if k is small, then so too are the reduced trees, and computing the TBR distance of these two reduced trees becomes less time-consuming. This process is known as kernelization.

This is where the networks come in. In a recent pre-print [2] we have shown that the situation is actually even better than Allen and Steel calculated: the reduced trees will have at most 15k-9 taxa (and in fact, for the subtree and chain reduction rules, this is the best you can do). Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, the argument leverages the phylogenetic network literature. While it is quite common to use distances between trees to help construct networks, it is less common to use networks as an analytical instrument to prove new results about trees. We thus consider our new result as a somewhat striking example of the relevance of phylogenetic networks.

The high-level idea is as follows. A recent publication [3] proved that if two trees T1 and T2 have TBR distance k, then a simplest unrooted phylogenetic network that embeds both T1 and T2 will have reticulation number k. The reticulation number of an unrooted phylogenetic network is basically equal to the number of edges you have to delete to turn it into an unrooted phylogenetic tree. Due to this equivalence the problem of computing the TBR distance of two trees can be transformed into that of constructing an unrooted phylogenetic network. See the figure below. The blue tree and the green tree (which have TBR distance 2) can be obtained from the unrooted phylogenetic network on the left (which has reticulation number 2), by cutting at the blue and green breakpoints in the network (respectively).

Why is this important? We know that, after collapsing common pendant subtrees, unrooted phylogenetic networks can be obtained by “decorating” a given backbone topology with taxa. This backbone topology (known as a generator) has roughly 3k edges where chains of taxa can be added to the network, where k is the TBR distance. The critical fact is that, if you add more than 9 taxa to one of these edges, then – however you extract the two embedded trees from the network – you will obtain two trees with a common chain (of length 4 or more, which is the threshold at which common chains are reduced). So, under the assumption that all common chains have been reduced, you can add at most 9 taxa to each edge.

The figure above allows us to obtain some intuition about this. In the network, there are two breakpoints interrupting the sequence of taxa {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}, one for the green tree and one for the blue tree. The interaction of these two breakpoints induces three (not necessarily maximal) chains that are common to both trees: on taxa sets {1,2,3,4}, {5,6,7} and {8,9} respectively. Under the common chain reduction rule, chain {1,2,3,4} would have already been collapsed (since the reduction rule collapses common chains of length 4 or more) – so in fact a situation in which two breakpoints are placed along the sequence {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}, as shown in the figure, cannot happen if we assume that the reduction rules had already been applied to exhaustion. You could try to fix this by shifting the blue and green breakpoint one place anticlockwise, to give common chains {1,2,3}, {4,5,6} and {7,8,9}. Sometimes such shifts will work, sometimes they will not. However, if there had been 10 taxa here, rather than 9, you can never avoid creating a common chain of size 4 or more, no matter where you place the two breakpoints. This is simply because, however you partition the set {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10} into three contiguous intervals, at least one of the intervals will have size 4 (or more). This common chain should then, by assumption, already have been collapsed.

This limit of 9 taxa already puts an upper bound of (roughly) 3k * 9 = 27k on the number of taxa in the reduced trees. To get to the improved bound of 15k-9, we observe that there is a limit to the number of edges that can carry 9 taxa. (Specifically: only those edges that carry two breakpoints can carry 9 taxa and the number of those edges is limited to k). The remaining edges can be decorated with at most 6, or 3, taxa, and after a bit of counting magic we obtain our result.

Interestingly, the phylogenetic network perspective does not only help us to obtain this improved upper bound, it also plays a crucial role in helping us to prove that you can’t, in the worst case, obtain a bound better than 15k-9 (even if, as well as collapsing common subtrees and chains, you also try to decompose the trees around common splits).

Looking forward, it is natural to ask: is this a one-off success? Or might it be possible to use a similar “backwards network perspective” in other unexpected places to help improve best-known results about trees?

REFERENCES

[1] Allen, B. L., & Steel, M. (2001). Subtree transfer operations and their induced metrics on evolutionary trees. Annals of combinatorics, 5(1), 1-15.

[2] Kelk, S., & Linz, S. (2018). A tight kernel for computing the tree bisection and reconnection distance between two phylogenetic trees. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.06892.

[3] Van Iersel, L., Kelk, S., Stamoulis, G., Stougie, L., & Boes, O. (2018). On unrooted and root-uncertain variants of several well-known phylogenetic network problems. Algorithmica, 80(11), 2993-3022.

Please stop using cladograms!

I really like the journal PeerJ, not only because it is open access and publishes the peer review process, but also because it's one of the few that adhere to strict policies when it comes to data documentation. In my last (on my own) 2-piece post (part 1, part 2), I showed what networks could have offered for historical and more recent studies in Cladistics, the journal of the Willi Hennig Society. In this one, I'll illustrate why paleontology in general needs to stop using cladograms.

An example

In a recent article, Atterholt et al. (PeerJ 6: e5910, 2018) describe and discuss "the most complete enantiornithine from North America and a phylogenetic analysis of the Avisauridae". I'm not a paleozoologist and "stuff of legend", but their first 17 figures seem to make a good point about the beauty of the fossil and its relevance; and it is interesting to read about it. This makes me envy paleozoologists a bit — the reason I exchanged chemistry for paleontology was my childhood love for the thunder lizards; I specialized in zoology not botany for graduate biology courses, and I fell in love with social insects, especially bees; but then more general circumstances pushed me into plant phylogenetics.

The result of Atterholt et al.'s phylogenetic analysis is presented in their figure 18, as shown here.

Figure 18 of Atterholt et al. (2018): "A cladogram depicting the hypothetical phylogenetic position of Mirarce eatoni." [the beautiful fossil is highlighted in bold font]

This looks very familiar — graphs like this can be seen in many paleontological studies, not only those in Cladistics. However, this is a phylogeneticist's "nightmare" (but a cladist's "dream").

First, phylogenetic trees, especially those that were weighted post-analysis several times to get a more or less resolved tree, should be depicted as phylograms — trees with branch lengths. Phylogenetic hypotheses are not only about clades, and what is sister to what, but about the amount of (inferred) evolutionary change between the hypothetical ancestors, the internal nodes, and their descendants, the labelled tips. For example, we may want to know how long is the root of the clade (Avisauridae, Avisaurus s.l.) comprising the focus taxon compared to the lengths of the terminal branches within the clade. Prominent roots and short terminals are a good sign for monophyly (inclusive common origin), or at least a fossil well placed, whereas short roots and long terminals are not.

The above tree as phylogram (using PAUP*'s AccTran optimization). The beauty of cladistic classification is that the new specimen could have just been described as another species of Avisaurus (but read the author's discussion).

In this example, we seem to be on the safe side, although one may question the general taxonomic concept for extinct birds. Are the differences enough to erect a new genus for every specimen? This is hard to decide based on this matrix.

Second, a tree without branch support is just a naked line graph, telling us nothing about the quality (strengths and weaknesses) of the backing data. Neontologists are not allowed to publish naked trees. In molecular phylogenetics, we are not uncommonly asked by reviewers to drop all branches (internodes) below an arbitrary threshold: a bootstrap (BS) support value < 70 and posterior probability (PP) < 0.95. In palaentology, it has become widely accepted to not show support values at all. The reason is simple: the branch support is always low, because of data gaps and homoplasy. This is a problem the authors are well aware of:

The modified matrix consists of 43 taxa (26 enantiornithines, 10 ornithuromorphs) scored across 252 morphological characters [the provided matrix lists 253], which we analyzed using TNT (Goloboff, Farris & Nixon, 2008a). Early avian evolution is extremely homoplastic (O’Connor, Chiappe & Bell, 2011; Xu, 2018) thus we utilized implied weighting (without implied weights Pygostylia was resolved as a polytomy due to the placement of Mystiornis) (Goloboff et al., 2008b); we explored k values from one to 25 (see Supplemental Information) and found that the tree stabilized at k values higher than 12. In the presented analysis we conducted a heuristic search using tree-bisection reconnection retaining the single shortest tree from every 1,000 replications with a k-value of 13. This produced six most parsimonious trees with a score of 25.1. These trees differed only in the relative placement of five enantiornithines closely related to the Avisauridae, forming a polytomy with this clade in the strict consensus tree (Consistency Index = 0.453; Retention Index = 0.650; Fig. 18).

I've seen much worse CI and RI values in the paleophylogenetic literature (some of them are plotted in this post). For a phylogenetic inference, homoplasy equals internally incompatible signals — many characters show different, partly or fully conflicting, taxon bipartitions; or, in other words, they prefer different trees. The signal in the matrix is thus not tree-like — it doesn't fit a single tree. That's why we have to choose one using TNT's iterated reweighting procedures. (Note: an alternative "phenetic" Neighbor-joining tree has a computation time < 1s, and produces the same tree for the Ornithumorpha and the root-proximal, 'basal' part of the tree, except that Jeholornis is moved two nodes up; but it shuffles a lot in the Longirostravis–Avisauridae clade.)

Another point is that the more homoplasy we have, then the higher must have been the rate of change (here: visible anatomical mutation). The higher the rate of change, the higher the statistical inconsistency of parsimony.

In short, paleontologists (Atterholt et al. just follow the standard in paleophylogenetic publications) use data with tree-unlike signal to infer trees (see also David's last post on illogicality in phylogenetics) under a possibly invalid optimality criterion, which are then used to downweight characters (eliminate noise due to homoplasy) to infer less noisy, "better" trees.

The basic signal

We can't change the data, but we can explore and show its signal. And the basic signal from the unfiltered matrix is best visualized using a Neighbor-net splits graph.

Neighbor-net based on mean pairwise taxon distances. Thick edges correspond to branches in the published tree.

Some differentiation patterns that explain the clades in the tree can be traced, but it becomes difficult in the group that is of most interest: the (inferred) clade(s) comprising the newly described fossil. In the Neighbor-net this is placed close to another member of the Avisauridae, but not all. The matrix is not optimal for the task at hand.

The data properties

The matrix is a multistate matrix with up to six states in the definition line (although only five are used, as state "5" is not present). The taxa have variable gappyness (i.e. the proportion of completely undetermined cells), between 2% (extant birds: Anas and Gallus) and 94% (Intiornis, an Avisauridae) — the median is 56%, and the average close to it (54%). The "hypothetically" placed fossil Mirarce eatoni (in the matrix it is under its old designation: "Kaiparowits") lacks a bit more of the scored characters (61%). That may strike one as a lot, but note that the matrix has 253 characters! However, we may well ask: if I want to place a fossil for which I can score 99 characters, why bother to include another ~150 that tell me nothing about its affinity? (Note: paleobotanists struggle hard even to get such numbers, we usually have at best 50 characters.)

Its closest putative relatives, the Avisaurus s.l., lack 90% of the characters; leaving us with max. 25 characters supporting the relevant clade (assuming that the 10% are all found in Mirarce as well). Coverage is not much better in the next-closest relatives (phylogenetically speaking).

Data coverage in the phylogenetic neighborhood of Mirarce eatoni

The missing data percentage may have mislead the Neighbor-net a bit, because we will have fed it with unrepresentative or highly ambiguous pairwise distances. In the the network, the focus fossil comes close to Neuquenornis, the only other Avisauridae with some data coverage. Looking at the heat map below, we see that missing data is indeed a problem in this matrix — we have zero distances between several pairs that show different distances to the better-covered taxa.

The distance matrix drawn as a heat map: green = similar, red = dissimilar (values range between 0 and 0.8). Red arrows: taxa with too many (and ambiguous) zero pairwise distances.

The closest relative of Mirarce is, indeed, Avisaurus/Gettya gloriae, but the latter has zero distances to various other poorly covered taxa from the phylogenetic neighborhood, in contrast to the much better-covered Mirarce. Neighbor-nets are very good at getting the obvious out of a morphological matrix, but they don't perform miracles. However, why should we include poorly known taxa at all during phylogenetic inference? Wouldn't it be better to infer a backbone tree (or network showing the alternative hypotheses) based on a less gappy matrix, and then find the optimal position of the poorly known taxa within that tree (network)?

Estimating the actual character support

Some characters cover just 10–20% of the taxa, whereas others are scored for most of them — more than half of the characters are missing for more than half of the taxa. Using TNT's iterative weight-to-fit option means that we infer a tree, ideally one fitting the well-covered data (taxon- and character-wise), and then downweight all conflicting characters elsewhere to fit this tree. We then end up with a tree where we have no idea about actual character support. Since the matrix is a Swiss cheese, we only can re-affirm the first-inferred tree.

Let's check the raw character support, using non-parametric bootstrapping and maximum likelihood as the optimality criterion (corrected for ascertainment bias, as implemented in RAxML).

ML-BS Consensus Network (using Lewis' 2-parameter Mk+G model). Edge lengths are proportional to the BS support values of taxon bipartitions (= phylogenetic splits, internodes, branches in phylogenetic trees). Only splits are shown that occurred in at least 10% of 900 BS pseudoreplicates (number of necessary BS replicates determined by the Extended Majority Rule Bootstrap criterion), trivial splits collapsed. Thick edges correspond with branches in Atterholt et al.'s iterative parsimony tree; coloring as before.

The ML bootstrap Consensus Network bears not a few similarities to the distance-based Neighbor-net. The characters do not support the Avisauridae subtree, as depicted in the published TNT tree, but there are faint signals associating some of them to each other, despite the missing data. Keep in mind: a BS support of 20 for one alternative and < 10 for all others means (ideally) one fifth of the characters support the split, and the rest have no (coherent) information. Some sister pairs have quite high support (for this kind of data set), and Gettya gloriae is resolved as sister of Mirarce (unambiguously, with a BS support = 67). But, the matrix hardly has the capacity to resolve deeper relationships within the group of interest, the Enantiornithes — the polytomy with the next relatives seen in the tree and the corresponding clade dissolve. This confirms what we saw in the Neighbor-Net (despite missing data distortion).

The matrix and the tree show something that could have been deduced directly from the distance matrix: the poorly known Gettya (Avisaurus) gloriae is (literally) the closest relative of the enigmatic new genus / species Mirarce (morphological distance of 0.08 compared to 0.1–0.64 for all other taxa). But is this overall similarity enough to conclude Avisaurus, Gettya and Mirarce are a monophyletic group within the Avisauridae?

What the authors (and all paleontologists doing phylogenetics) should have done

(I would have skipped all trees, naturally, but peer reviewers and most readers probably need to see them.)

• Trimmed the matrix to include only those characters preserved in the fossil of interest, in order to minimize missing data artefacts during inference.
• Shown the Neighbor-net to visualize the primary signal situation, including and excluding poorly covered taxa. From the Neighbor-net it is already obvious that the fossil is an Enantiornithes, so any subsequent optimization / inference could have focussed on this group alone.
• Then inferred a backbone tree excluding poorly covered taxa, and shown the resulting phylogram. In case one needs to test the Enantiornithes root (the Neighbor-net gives us two alternatives for the Enantiornithes root: Pengornis + Eopengornis or Protopteryx + Iberomesornis), there is no point in including the poorly covered Enantiornithes or the worst-covered taxa outside this clade.
• Then optimized the position of the poorly covered taxa in the backbone tree. I recommend using RAxML's evolutionary placement algorithm (EPA) for this, but you can also do this in a parsimony framework if you wish. (EPA can also be used to test outgroup roots: here, one would search the branch at which all non-Enantiornithes fit best.)
• Shown the resulting phylogram including all taxa — that is, read in the topology to the analysis, and then re-optimize branch lengths.
• Shown a Support Consensus Network to illustrate the support for the branches in the preferred tree and their competing alternatives. (There may be one or more, as there are many options to estimate branch support.) How sure can we be about relationships within the Avisauridae and their relationships to other Enantiornithes?

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Postscriptum. For those who are curious about how the ML tree would look like, here it is:

I have no idea about birds, but from a methodological point of view this is an equally (if not more, because unforced) valid hypothesis for the data set. And demonstrating its limitations: note the relatively long branches with very low support making up the backbone of the Enantiornithes clade. This is typical for matrices lacking coherent discriminatory signal and/or struggling with internal conflict.

The pedigree of grape varieties

We are all familiar with the concept of a family tree (formally called a pedigree). People have been compiling them for at least a thousand years, as the first known illustration is from c.1000 CE (see the post on The first royal pedigree). However, these are not really tree-like, in spite of their name, unless we exclude most of the ancestors from the diagram. After all, family histories consist of males and females inter-breeding in a network of relationships, and this cannot be represented as a simple tree-like diagram without leaving out most of the people. I have written blog posts about quite a few famous people who have really quite complex and non-tree-like family histories (including Cleopatra, Tutankhamun, Charles II of Spain, Charles Darwin, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Albert Einstein).

Clearly, the history of domesticated organisms is even more complex than that of humans. After all, in most cases we have gone to a great deal of trouble to make these histories complex, by deliberately cross-breeding current varieties (of plants) and breeds (of animals) to make new ones. So, I have previously raised the question: Are phylogenetic trees useful for domesticated organisms? The answer is the same: no, unless you leave out most of the ancestry.

In most cases, we have no recorded history for domesticated organisms, because most of the breeding and propagating was undocumented. Until recently, it was effectively impossible to reconstruct the pedigrees. This has changed with modern access to genetic information; and there is now quite a cottage industry within biology, trying to work out how we got our current varieties of cats, dogs, cows and horses, as well as wheat, rye and grapes, etc. I have previously looked at some of these histories, including Complex hybridizations in wheat, and Complex hybridizations in barley and its relatives.

Grapes

One example of particular interest has been grape varieties. I have discussed some of the issues in a previous post: Grape genealogies are networks, not trees, including the effects of unsampled ancestors when trying to perform the reconstruction.

There are a number of places around the web where you can see heavily edited summaries of what is currently known about the grape pedigree. However, these simplifications defeat the purpose of this blog post, which is to emphasize the historical complexity. The only diagram that I know of that shows you the full network (as currently known) is one provided by Pop Chart (The Genealogy of Wine), a commercial group who provide infographic posters for just about anything. They will sell you a full-sized poster of the pedigree (3' by 2'), but here I have provided a simple overview (which you can click on to see somewhat larger).

You can actually zoom in on the diagram on the Pop Chart web page to see all of the details. This allows you to spend a few happy hours finding your favorite varieties, and to see how they are related. You will presumably get lost among the maze of lines, as I did.