Analyzing Evolutionary Histories
Time and place
1:45 PM on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019; Marshak 418N
Katherine St. John (Hunter College, CUNY GC, AMNH)
Abstract
Trees are a canonical structure for representing evolutionary histories. Many popular criteria used to infer optimal trees are computationally hard, and the number of possible tree shapes grows super-exponentially in the number of taxa. We choose one popular optimality criteria and address the question of where do turtles fit in the tree of life? The answer is subject to debate. We analyze different hypothesis under the Maximum Parsimony Criteria and discuss why it is computationally hard to find the optimal tree in the general case.
