this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
1383 points (98.9% liked)

Science Memes

10271 readers
2707 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.


Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

So you can't write dates/millenia on the "y-axis" (time axis)? Since when do turtles exist for example?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Then it'd have to be to-scale. That's not good if you only care about the order.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It would technically be wrong because the dates would have no appropriate scale. The difference between each node could be wildly different and also irrelevant to the solution space this virtual representation is trying to convey. Egg before chicken, check

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If you actually wanted a phylogenetic tree to scale you would end up with a huuuge tree that has many more branches because it obviously is not as simple as depicted above. Take birds for example: There are all the dinosaurs in between that weren't birds but have their own branches. It has actually been a tough question where to draw the line between dinosaurs and birds (there is a whole article on wiki). And if you have any paraphyletic groups in your tree it gets even messier! If you are already displaying other groups at the subfamily level, you should then display all groups at this level.

All this is to say that the level of detail contained in a phylogenetic tree (or any graph for that matter) is highly dependent on the information you want to convey. Ideally you should draw it as detailed as necessary and as simplified as possible. In this case, we get all the information that is necessary but are not overwhelmed with facts that if you draw Squamata (lizards and snakes), you would also have to draw Rhynchocephalia (monotypic order) in.