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Cunningham,
C.W, Omland, K.E, Oakley, T.H. 1998.
Reconstructing ancestral character states: a critical reappraisal. Trends in Ecology and Evolution
Using parsimony to reconstruct ancestral character states on
a phylogenetic tree has become a popular method for testing ecological
and evolutionary hypotheses. Despite
its popularity, the assumptions and uncertainties of reconstructing
the ancestral states of a single character have received less attention
than the challenging endeavor of reconstructing phylogenetic
trees from many characters. Recent research suggests that parsimony
reconstructions are often sensitive to violations of the almost universal
assumption of equal probabilities of gains and losses. In addition,
maximum likelihood has been developed as an alternative to parsimony
reconstruction, and has also revealed a surprising amount of uncertainty
in ancestral reconstructions. |