User talk:Rmcclosk/sandbox/Ancestral reconstruction

Notable edits to original page
The bit in the introduction about "filling in gaps" in phylogenetic trees was a bit unclear. I've changed this to indicate that we are examining parts of phylogenetic trees which correspond to the possibly distant past, thereby clarifying the evolutionary history of the species in the tree. I also reworded the part about modern genetic sequences being a variation of ancient ones. The sentence "One of the most prominent examples is tracing the evolution that took place from ape to man", which I've moved into the history section, seems important but has no citation. I've left it in and added a "Citation needed" tag. I moved the methods overview into the front of the new methods section, but shortened/rewrote it significantly, since much of the information (like which method came first) is contained in the body of the relevant section. There were some things in the existing methods that seemed to refer to phylogenetic tree reconstruction, not ancestral state reconstruction. For example, from maximum parsimony: "In other words, you accept a phylogenetic tree which has the transition from one state to another represented with the least possible number of changes." I removed these. This sentence under Parsimony was out of context and removed: "The Cambrian Explosion represented a period of time with a pronounced increase in the variation of organisms in phyla." This sentence from maximum likelihood is wrong and was rephrased: "The method of maximum likelihood involves assuming the phenotypes that developed, the ones that you see, were those that were statistically most likely." The subsections "Trait reconstruction", "DNA and protein reconstruction", and "Genome reconstruction" have all been integrated into the relevant parts of Applications. There was a bit of a methods overview at the beginning of "Trait reconstruction" that I took out, since it's redundant given the existing overview at the beginning of the methods section. The second paragraph under "DNA and Protein reconstruction" was pretty nicely written, so I just copied it verbatim into the "Molecular Evolution" part of Applications. The third paragraph is more of an overview, and was put at the beginning of the Applications section.

Rmcclosk (talk) 00:27, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

By the way
cite pmid is discontinued And no bot fills it in AManWithNoPlan (talk) 04:42, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

This tools might be useful too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PleaseStand/References_segregator