Table of Contents

Preface
1: Victor A. Albert: Parsimony and phylogenetics in the genomic age
The philosophy of parsimony analysis, including comparison with model-based approaches
2: Arnold G. Kluge: What is the rationale for 'Ockham's Razor' (a.k.a. parsimony) in phylogenetic inference?
3: Elliott Sober: Parsimony and its presuppositions
Parsimony, character analysis, and optimization of sequence characters
4: Brent D. Mishler: The logic of the data matrix in phylogenetic analysis
5: Ward C. Wheeler: Alignment, dynamic homology, and optimization
6: Jan De Laet: Parsimony and the problem of inapplicables in sequence data
Computational limits of parsimony analysis: from historical aspects to competition with fast model-based approaches
7: Jerrold I. Davis, Kevin C. Nixon, Damon P. Little: The limits of conventional cladistic analysis
8: Pablo A. Goloboff, Diego Pol: Parsimony and Bayesian phylogenetics
Mathematical attributes of parsimony
9: Mike Steel and David Penny: Maximum parsimony and the phylogenetic information in multi-state characters
Parsimony and genomics
10: David A. Liberles: Using phylogeny to understand genomic evolution
11: Igor Rogozin et al.: Dollo parsimony and reconstruction of genome evolution
References
Index

About the Author

Victor A. Albert is at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Norway. Professor Albert's research interests lie primarily within plant evolutionary biology, including comparative genomics, evolutionary developmental biology, molecular adaptation, and phylogenetic systematics.

Reviews

There is a lot to consider in the book for practicing systematists, mostly issues of molecular systematics, ranging from DNA sequence alignment problems to those of the practicality of analysis of the enormous and ever increasing data sets that are generated by genomic approaches to phylogeny reconstruction. Olivier Rieppel, Biology and Philosophy (2007), 22:141-144 All in all, this is an interesting conribution to the genre. The production quality of the book is mostly very good. Staunch devotees of parsimony will find this to be an essential reference, while everyone else will find much that is of interest. Systematic Biology, 56(1): 147-149, 2007 ... a cogent, comprehensive overview ... of parsimony and its role in genomics. Rob DeSalle, Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol 82, June 2007 ...this is the book to consult if you want to know more about the role that parsimony analysis has to play in phylogenetics today and what it might be used for in the future. Systematic Biology, 56(1): 147-149, 2007