On universal common ancestry, sequence similarity, and phylogenetic structure: the sins of P-values and the virtues of Bayesian evidence.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The universal common ancestry (UCA) of all known life is a fundamental component of modern evolutionary theory, supported by a wide range of qualitative molecular evidence. Nevertheless, recently both the status and nature of UCA has been questioned. In earlier work I presented a formal, quantitative test of UCA in which model selection criteria overwhelmingly choose common ancestry over independent ancestry, based on a dataset of universally conserved proteins. These model-based tests are founded in likelihoodist and Bayesian probability theory, in opposition to classical frequentist null hypothesis tests such as Karlin-Altschul E-values for sequence similarity. In a recent comment, Koonin and Wolf (K&W) claim that the model preference for UCA is "a trivial consequence

SUBMITTER: Theobald DL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3314578 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature