I have written before about the presentation of historical information using the pictorial representation of a phylogeny (eg. Phylogenetic ...

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...

Lake Malawi, in south-eastern Africa, is famous for its large diversity of cichlid fishes. Indeed, it sometimes seems to have more biologist...

Over the years, a number of methods have been explored for constructing evolutionary networks, starting with parsimony criteria for optimiz...

There has been considerable interest in recent years in developing methods that will detect hybridization in the presence of incomplete lin...

I have previously noted that the first known phylogenetic network concerned dog breeds, in 1755 ( The first phylogenetic network ) — a netw...

The Tree of Knowledge is a well-known concept, and the tree can indeed be used to arrange information. One possible use is to describe the ...

It seems to me that the study of reticulate evolutionary histories currently boils down to two options: (1) reconstructing a species ...

I have noted before that the genealogies for all domesticated organisms are networks not trees, and specifically they are hybridization net...

If one combines a Y chromosome genealogy, which usually shows the paternal ancestry, with a mitochondrial genealogy, which usually shows th...

The drawing of large genealogies is not easy, and phylogeneticists (among others) have tried a number of solutions, including circular diag...

I have written before about Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). (Actually, he was called Georges-Louis Leclerc from 1707-17...

In a former blog post I discussed the complex series of polyploid hybridizations that led to modern wheat cultivars ( Complex hybridization...

Creating evolutionary phylogenetic networks is currently a somewhat ad hoc procedure, with a number of competing strategies based on variou...

One of the perennially most popular posts in this blog has been the one about the domestication of dogs: Why do we still use trees for the ...

Splits graphs are a useful way of displaying contradictory information within evolutionary datasets, either incompatible characters (ie. th...

Phylogenetic networks were developed as a professional tool for displaying complicated evolutionary histories. However, this does no mean t...

Phylogenetic networks are intended to display reticulate evolutionary histories, rather than strictly divergent or transformational histori...

In the literature, phylogenetic trees often appear even when the paper is discussing non-tree evolutionary histories. A case in point is ...

Phylogenetic networks can be used to illustrate the history of any set of objects or concepts, provided that this history is a divergent on...