July 2012 archive

The magnolia misunderstanding

Angiosperm phylogeny stressing magnoliids [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]: thistle appears as an outgroup to the ((magnolia,bay),(pepper,birthwort)) clade

T. Ryan Gregory has a great post at Genomicron on the ‘Platypus Fallacy’. He imagines a platypus professor explaining the wonders of the Human Genome Project to a group of student platypodes: “The lineage of which humans are a part is a very ancient offshoot of our mammalian family tree, so it was 166 million …

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