Blogging runs in families

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 | Metablogging

Families of closely related topics that is. Morgan D. Jackson set out to reconstruct the phylogeny of insect blogs:

You will think that a blog with the name of Archetype would be very close to the root of the tree, if not being the root itself. Oh well, this blog seems to be well nested in a clade “higher up”. But look at the bright side, Archetype’s sister blog is excellent and the one that lead me into blogging in the first place.

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5 Comments to Blogging runs in families

Alex Wild
April 22, 2010

At least you’re not a primitive ant blogger like me.

Kai
April 22, 2010

Thank GOD he used standard cladistics, and not some silly ad hoc algorithm like maximum likelyhood.

Roberto Keller
April 22, 2010

You are not primitive Alex, just basal… or was it ancestral? Oh nvm then.

Kai, I’m not sure I agree. Maybe using statistical-based methods can show that the branch leading to Myrmecos is a really long one.

Kai
April 22, 2010

Question: What does “really long branch” even mean, and how can it be empirically tested?

Silly pheneticists…systematics is for parsimony!

owlfarmer
April 23, 2010

I’m just stopping by (quite by accident; I was doing a google search on “archetypes” for a segment of a myth class) because the coincidence is too good to ignore. I was listening to E. O. Wilson on Diane Rehm yesterday, reinvigorating my respect for ants, and then this morning happened on your very interesting and quite enlightening blog. I’ll be back (that’s not a threat) when I’ve got more time to enjoy it.

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And as we discussed last semester, the Army Ants will leave nothing but your bones.
- Tom Waits

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Ant reconstruction one homology at a time