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The end of phylogenetic controversies

Explore the macroevolutionary time scale and its role in understanding the evolution of ray-finned fishes through molecular phylogenetics.

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I put up kind of a ridiculous title. But I do hope that at some point in the near future we'll have some of the same flavor of debates on the macroevolutionary time scale that we have on the human microevolutionary time scale. There'll be a surfeit of sequence at nearly every node of interest on the tree of life, and computational power galore devoted to analyzing variation and reconstructing any phylogeny we can conceive of. To be fair, one could argue we aren't there even with human phylogenetics either. But it is rather strange we're debating the origin of mammals and the nature of the lineage's phylogenetic tree at this time. This is the kind of thing that I hope a more robust and assertive molecular phylogenetics can resolve (and paleontology as well, but I'm not up on the latest in computational analysis of morphological characters). In any case, ...

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