genealogy
Felsenstein J 2009 Coalescents in full bloom. Evolution 63:3275-3276.
- review of: Wakeley J 2009 (2008?) Coalescent theory. An introduction. Roberts & Co. ISBN:9780974707754
- 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