Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Felsenstein, Joseph

Titel

Distance Methods for Inferring Phylogenies: A Justification

Ist Teil von

• Evolution, 1984-01, Vol.38 (1), p.16-24

Ort / Verlag

Malden, MA: Society for the Study of Evolution

Erscheinungsjahr

1984

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Free E-Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The logic of inferring phylogenies from measures of the phenotypic distance between species is examined, and a statistical model constructed. Criticisms which have been levelled by Farris (1981) against methods of inferring phylogenies from distances are dependent on one particular interpretation of the entity being inferred. If we take the branch lengths on the tree to be expected distances rather than path lengths, the major criticisms of these methods lose their force. Under the expected distance view, there is no reason to abandon distance measures solely because they fail to satisfy the triangle inequality. The expected distance interpretation fits naturally into a statistical inference framework for inferring phylogenies. This in turn provides justification for some of the most widely-used criteria of goodness of fit between a tree and the observed distances. However, the statistical framework does emphasize the weakness of distance methods if the assumptions of additivity of distances among the tree and of independence of the measurement errors of the distances are not met. The possible failure of additivity and of independence seem to be the most serious problems with using distance methods. These assumptions are dubious for many kinds of data often analyzed by distance methods. The assumption of a molecular clock affects the details of the computations, but can be fit into the statistical framework without difficulty. Given the validity of the additivity and independence assumptions, a statistical test of the clock could be performed.