genealogy

Felsenstein J 2009 Coalescents in full bloom. Evolution 63:3275-3276.

  • we should have realized that our paradigm would then change to being retrospective
  • for a long time, we did not realize this
  • back in 1971, I wrote a paper that (we can now see) came within inches of deriving the coalescent
  • but I did not even think about that issue
  • retrospective views of processes did not seem to be of any interest
  • if we only consider the randomness of the true MRCA, which we do not see, we miss an additional source of noise
  • namely the uncertainty of our estimate of the tree