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Comment
. 2006 Nov 28;103(48):18029-30.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0608880103. Epub 2006 Nov 20.

Charting uncertainty about ant origins

Ross H Crozier  1
Affiliations
Comment

Charting uncertainty about ant origins

Ross H Crozier. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Certainty becomes managed uncertainty. Analyzing the complete sequence ant data set together with outgroups yielded tree A, with the outgroups joining at the filled star, implying that the Leptanillinae are the sister group to all other ants. Analyzing just the ant sequences led to a significantly different result, tree B. Testing nine hypotheses (dots or stars) for rooting the ant tree eliminated four but left five as statistically not separable. The most likely of these, shown with a filled star, remains on the branch to the Leptanillinae, but the second most likely, shown with an open star, falls on the branch to the rest of the ants, implying that the leptanillines are closely related to the Amblyponinae, with which they share some striking characteristics. Thick lines denote branches with posterior probability of at least 0.95. The instability of the ingroup according to whether outgroups are included in the analysis may have resulted from long branch attraction.
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Comment on

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