| Study and Review Hint for question 9 Review Section 14.2, The Phylogeny of Whales. You should see a similarity between methods used to evaluate alternative phylogenetic trees and the statistics we use to determine whether or not two or more populations differ significantly in some way. The computer methods used to determine the most parsimonious tree will almost always come up with one that is numerically "better" than the others. To be confident in that it's the best estimate of the true phylogeny, however, we need to evaluate its strength relative to the other trees that are almost as parsimonious. |