the molecular phylogenetic trees of 42 representative samples of malaysian pangasiid were constructed using cytochrome c oxidase subunit i (coi). the topologies resulting from molecular analyses, maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and bayesian inference, revealed the paraphyly of pangasius genus and monophyly of p. nasutus, p. bocourti, p. micronemus, and p. hypopthalmus with high support v...

We give an explicit construction to solve a conjecture of Mike Steel and David Penny that any phylogeny involving N taxa can be recovered unambiguously using on the order of log N binary characters and the method of maximum parsimony. Biologically, this means that homoplasy need not be a deterrent to parsimony methods. Some patterns of homoplasy are phylogenetically informative and can exponent...

Heterotachy occurs when the relative evolutionary rates among sites are not the same across lineages. Sequence alignments are likely to exhibit heterotachy with varying severity because the intensity of purifying selection and adaptive forces at a given amino acid or DNA sequence position is unlikely to be the same in different species. In a recent study, the influence of heterotachy on the per...

Morphological data provide the only means of classifying the majority of life's history, but the choice between competing phylogenetic methods for the analysis of morphology is unclear. Traditionally, parsimony methods have been favoured but recent studies have shown that these approaches are less accurate than the Bayesian implementation of the Mk model. Here we expand on these findings in sev...