I'm just getting back to the Dechronization suite in Moscow, Idaho after a full day of talks, discussions, and poster sessions at Evolution 2009. The meetings started yesterday, highlighted by an outstanding symposium on diversification organized by Mike Alfaro and two Dechronization contributors: Dan Rabosky and Luke Harmon (more on that in a subsequent post). Today featured presentations by winners of the American Society of Naturalist's Young Investigator prize, including Jason Kolbe and Luke Harmon. I was also witness to the sociological phenomenon known as the Felsenstein Effect, which describes the surge of people who flood into a seminar room to see Joe Felsenstein talk. I took the photos to the right before, during and immediately after his talk today. His talk was an interesting discussion of a new method to analyze morphometric data in a phylogenetic context (co-authored with Bookstein). There were certainly more people in the room than at any other talk I've ever seen on the technical nature of morphometric analysis.
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Felsenstein Effect
I'm just getting back to the Dechronization suite in Moscow, Idaho after a full day of talks, discussions, and poster sessions at Evolution 2009. The meetings started yesterday, highlighted by an outstanding symposium on diversification organized by Mike Alfaro and two Dechronization contributors: Dan Rabosky and Luke Harmon (more on that in a subsequent post). Today featured presentations by winners of the American Society of Naturalist's Young Investigator prize, including Jason Kolbe and Luke Harmon. I was also witness to the sociological phenomenon known as the Felsenstein Effect, which describes the surge of people who flood into a seminar room to see Joe Felsenstein talk. I took the photos to the right before, during and immediately after his talk today. His talk was an interesting discussion of a new method to analyze morphometric data in a phylogenetic context (co-authored with Bookstein). There were certainly more people in the room than at any other talk I've ever seen on the technical nature of morphometric analysis.
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Is the paper on analyzing morphometrics in a phylogenetic context out yet? If so, do you have the citation/DOI?
Thanks a mil!
Definitely not out yet. Seemed pretty preliminary given that he cited likely bugs in the software as a possible explanation for some anomalous results.
Thanks for the reply! I am curious as to whether it assigns weights or probabilities to morphometric characters and whether his software will use both morphometric data and genetic data. Damn you preliminary work! How dost thou tease me!
Thanks. So ... a new named Effect! I notice that the third photo is while I am still visible answering questions at the front of the room. Which means that the photographer couldn't really wait until after the talk because he too was about to bail out!
The link to my web page is to an outdated one with a 1992 photo. My web page is really here
The morphometrics work is not yet written up but we hope to have the methods available in a couple of months in an alpha-release of PHYLIP 3.7a, in program Contrast. In the meantime you can do pretty well by making a Procrustes superposition of the forms and just dumping the coordinates into Contrast after that.
I fixed the original link. I actually did stick around after your talk to see Binder's work on fungi because I dig key innovations!
Well to be fair those people probably had to leave quickly to start the ten minute hike to the next talk they wanted to see.
Full credit: the talk after Felsenstein's was titled "Key innovations and evolutionary trends in mushroom-forming fungi estimated with BiSSE" and represented work by Binder, Hibbett and Fitzjohn. As Boris just pointed out to me, it was Hibbett, not Binder presenting. In any case, it was an excellent presentation.
Ha! I like it. I witnessed/contributed to that particular instance of The Effect myself. And it was quite dramatic...
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