| Study and Review Hint for question 10 Review section 14.2, The Phylogeny of Whales, and Box 14.1, Alternatives to parsimony: Maximum likelihood and genetic distances. The bottom line is that an inferred phylogeny is a hypothesis -- in this case, about evolutionary relationships. Parsimony, maximum likelihood, and distance methods are, in a sense, different tests of the hypothesis. The more tests that support a hypothesis, the more confident we can be that the hypothesis correctly explains the phenomenon we're interested in. |