Systematics Seminar
This is the home page of the UConn EEB department's Systematics Seminar. This is a graduate seminar devoted to issues of interest to graduate students and faculty who make up the systematics program at the University of Connecticut.
Click here for information about joining and using the Systematics email list
Meeting time and place
Except for the first meeting, we will meet in the Bamford Room (TLS 171) Tuesdays at 4pm. The first meeting will be held in the BioPharm 3rd. floor fishbowl (Bamford room reserved at this time by ecology search committee).
Theme for Spring Semester 2008
Unless there is loud objection, the theme this semester will be Tree Thinking. David Baum (Univ. Wisconsin, Madison) is writing a book on Tree Thinking and has agreed to let us read the chapters he has written in return for some constructive criticism. Baum's book will be supplemented with some thought-provoking and heated-debate-generating papers on subjects such as these:
- can you ever say that a clade is basal?
- do non-uniform clade priors make sense?
- what can and can't fossils say about node age
- when gene trees and species trees are both right, but different
- the signature of an adaptive radiation
Some suggested papers are listed below the schedule in the section entitled Some possibilities.
Schedule for Spring Semester 2008
Note: the papers linked here require a user name and password to access. If you have forgotten the user name and/or password, contact Paul Lewis.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008: Basal clades
Discussion leader: Paul Lewis
Two of our Tuesday time slots this semester will be taken over by departmental seminars, so rather than waste the first time slot with an organizational meeting, let's get right into things with a consideration of the meaning of the word basal.
- Crisp, M. D., and L. G. Cook. 2005. Do early branching lineages signify ancestral traits? TREE 20(3):105-149.
- Krell, F.-T., and P. S. Cranston. 2004. Which side of the tree is more basal? Systematic Entomology 29:279-281.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Discussion leader:
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Discussion leader: Change meeting time (EEB Dept. Seminar conflicts)?
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Discussion leader: Change meeting time (EEB Dept. Seminar conflicts)?
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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Tuesday, February 26, 2008
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Tuesday, March 4, 2008
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
No meeting (Spring Break)
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Watch out! (April Fool's Day)
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Tuesday, April 8, 2008
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
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Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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Some possibilities
Feel free to expand this list, and there is of course no requirement that papers for discussion be chosen from this list. To upload a PDF (and receive a free email describing how to make a link to it here), click this link to the upload form. You will need to know the username and password to upload a PDF (same combination needed to download PDFs from this web site).
Necessity of unequal split priors: undesirable?
The Velasco response in combination with one of the other two would make for an interesting discussion.
- Pickett. K. M., and C. P. Randle. 2005. Strange bayes indeed: uniform topological priors imply non-uniform clade priors. MPE 34: 203-211
- Velasco, J. D. 2007. Why non-uniform priors on clades are both unavoidable and unobjectionable. MPE 45:748-749
Phylocode: how to name a clade
Discusses tree terms such as crown group, stem lineage, etc.