Briefings in Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on December 6, 2008
Briefings in Bioinformatics 2008 9(6):547-549; doi:10.1093/bib/bbn036
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Mathematics of Evolution and Phylogeny.
Edited by Olivier Gascuel
Mathematics of Evolution and Phylogeny.
Edited by Olivier Gascuel, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK; 2005 (Hardcover), 2007 (Softcover); 416 pp.; ISBN: 978-0-19-856610-6; Hardcover; $120.00; ISBN: 978-0-19-923134-8; Softcover; $49.95.
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When I first entered the field of systematics and phylogeny as a graduate student in the early 1980s, analytical methods were just beginning to cope with the expansion of data sets from binary to multistate characters (still primarily from comparative morphology), and were mostly limited to distance and parsimony optimization criteria (maximum likelihood was not yet practical for realistically sized data sets). In the past 25 years, the field has come a long way on many fronts. Not only has the range of data types amenable to phylogenetic analysis exploded in the genomic age, but the diversity of analytical approaches has also grown exponentially, as has the size of data sets being analyzed.
Initially most of the development of new phylogenetic methodology depended on
Department of Entomology, 320 Morrill Hall, 505 S. Goodwin Avenue, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, 61801, USA
E-mail: jwhitfie@life.uiuc.edu