Phylogeny as population history

Creators: Velasco, Joel D.

Abstract

The construction and use of phylogenetic trees is central to modern systematics. But it is unclear exactly what phylogenies and phylogenetic trees represent. They are sometimes said to represent genealogical relationships between taxa, between species, or simply between "groups of organisms." But these are incompatible representational claims. This paper focuses on how trees are used to make inferences and then argues that this focus requires that phylogenies represent the histories of populations.

Additional Information

© 2013 Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which permits anyone to download, copy, distribute, or display the full text without asking for permission, provided that the creator(s) are given full credit, no derivative works are created, and the work is not used for commercial purposes. Received 2 October 2012; Revised 1 December 2012; Accepted 4 January 2013. I would like to thank the editors at Philosophy & Theory in Biology and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank numerous audiences and readers of various papers and talks of mine, many of which overlap with the contents of this paper and helped shape my thinking on this topic.

Attached Files

Published - 6959004.0005.002_view=003dtext=003brgn=003dmain

Published - 6959004.0005.002_view=text;rgn=main

Published - phylogeny-as-population-history.pdf

Files

phylogeny-as-population-history.pdf

Files (847.4 kB)

Name	Size	Download all
phylogeny-as-population-history.pdf md5:3cbb0e181c4a260b30cd2a5e6960fc30	749.2 kB	Preview Download
6959004.0005.002_view=003dtext=003brgn=003dmain md5:54a1eacf57805b29500942b07afbf011	98.2 kB	Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes