Evolution maximum parsimony

Fig. 1.7 Evolution of alkaloids in the phylogeny of plants. Using nucleotide sequences of the chloroplast gene rbcL a phylogenetic tree was computed with Maximum Parsimony. A bootstrap cladogram is shown with bootstrap values shown at the nodes. Branches leading to taxa that accumulate alkaloids are shown in bold.

In fact there was already a publication and justification of maximum parsimony in the systematics literature, for at the Systematics Association meeting, Phenetic and Phylogenetic Classification, in Liverpool in 1964 (Heywood and McNeill, 1964 Figure 8.1) Cavalli-Sforza and I had referred to the use of our method of minimum evolution and had commented, It is probable that this method gives a tree which is approximately the same as the projection... 

Phylogenetic relationships within the Ptychomniales were evalnated using maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference of chloroplast and mitochondrial DNA sequence data. Maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony were employed to study evolution of 18 morphological characters within... 

Thus, as expected, the design, operation, and performance of the EKR system are not easy. Mathematical models are necessary in order to gain a better understanding of the processes that occurs in the EKR and to allow predictions for the field-scale remediation. Generally, it is a good policy to keep the mathematical model as simple as possible while adequately describing the behavior of the main parameters of the system (principle of parsimony). Thus, models with relatively simple transport equations and few equilibrium equations are able to predict the evolution of parameters such as the rate of recovery of the toxic ion, the maximum recovery, the rate of acid addition, and the energy requirements. The equation of mass conservation for a pore water solute species (e.g. an ion) in an EKR system can be expressed as follows ... 

Figure 7.1 Minimum evolution (ME) tree based on LogDet distances of nearly complete rRNA sequences (18S-28S-partial S.8S). Rate heterogeneity among sites was approximated by assuming the proportion of invariable sites, to be 0.615 (see text for justification). Numbers above branches represent bootstrap values the lower numbers represent the ME bootstrap values, the upper numbers represent parsimony bootstrap values, and the middle numbers represent maximum-likelihood (ML) bootstrap values. Note the strong ME and ML bootstrap support for the lamprey+hagfish (cyclostome) clade.

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