Publications - Published papers
Please find below publications of our group. Currently, we list 565 papers. Some of the publications are in collaboration with the group of Sonja Prohaska and are also listed in the publication list for her individual group. Access to published papers (
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) is restricted to our local network and chosen collaborators.
If you have problems accessing electronic information, please let us know:©NOTICE: All papers are copyrighted by the authors; If you would like to use all or a portion of any paper, please contact the author.
Phylogenetics beyond biology
Retzlaff, Nancy and Stadler, Peter F.
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Status: Published
Th. Biosci. 137: 133-143
Abstract
Evolutionary processes have been described not only in biology but also for a wide range of human cultural activities including languages and law. In contrast to the evolution of DNA or protein sequences, the detailed mechanisms giving rise to the observed evolution-like processes are not or only partially known. The absence of a mechanistic model of evolution implies that it remains unknown how the distances between different taxa have to be quantified. Considering distortions of metric distances, we first show that poor choices of the distance measure can lead to incorrect phylogenetic trees. Based on the well-known fact that phylogenetic inference requires additive metrics, we then show that the correct phylogeny can be computed from a distance matrix 𝐃 if there is a monotonic, subadditive function 𝜁 such that 𝜁−1(𝐃) is additive. The required metric-preserving transformation 𝜁 can be computed as the solution of an optimization problem. This result shows that the problem of phylogeny reconstruction is well defined even if a detailed mechanistic model of the evolutionary process remains elusive.