88 Sentences With "most parsimonious" | Random Sentence Generator

The first, and the one that he finds most parsimonious, is that there's a simple alignment of interests.

Other sapient species may indeed be out there, but the most parsimonious explanation for all the U.F.O. encounters since Roswell is not that our nuclear testing or space program finally inspired the galaxy to come see what humanity is all about.

Recently, after conducting a multidisciplinary analysis of the remains, researchers found marks on the bones that pointed towards evidence of cannibalism: "Our results show that the Neandertals from the Troisième caverne of Goyet were butchered, with the hypothesis of their exploitation as food sources the most parsimonious explanation for the observed bone surface modifications," the study reads.

Image: Tom Higham, University of Oxford"My money would be on early modern humans, who can be mapped elsewhere at this date, for example at Ust'-Ishim in Siberia, but the authors of the Douka paper rather surprisingly argue that it's most parsimonious to assume that Denisovans were responsible, even though no Denisovans are yet known as late as that in the sequence," Stringer told Gizmodo.

Below the phylogenetic analysis of Caseasauria published by Benson in 2012. In 2015, Romano & Nicosia found a similar position for Euromycter in their most parsimonious analysis including nearly all caseids (to the exclusion of the very fragmentary Alierasaurus ronchi from Sardinia). Below the most parsimonious phylogenetic analysis published by Romano & Nicosia in 2015.

A phylogenetic analysis in 2016 recovered Septencoracias as the sister taxon of Primobucco. The most parsimonious tree, based on 21 taxa, is shown below.

Lohuecotitan was in 2016 recovered as a lithostrotian titanosaur, more derived than Malawisaurus. Its position among the lithostrotians is supported by the sharp angle of its zygapophyseal articulations. The consensus of the 20 most parsimonious phylogenetic trees recovered is shown below.

A phylogenetic network, one of many posited by the CPHL. The phylogenetic tree appear in black lines. The contact edges are the red lines. Here there are three, the most parsimonious number required to generate a feasible network for Indo-European.

The following cladogram follows an analysis by Fischer and colleagues in 2017, based on a dataset published by Benson and Druckenmiller in 2014 that was previously modified for the description of Makhaira in 2015. Due to the completeness of Luskhan, its position is based on scorings for 74% of the characteristics listed in the dataset. In the strict consensus of the 20,000 most parsimonious phylogenetic trees recovered, Makhaira forms a polytomy with Pliosaurus species, instead of forming a clade with other brachauchenines; however, in the consensus of the 24 most parsimonious trees, it is the most basal brachauchenine, with Luskhan being the next most basal brachauchenine.

Within this clade, a close relationship between K. langenbergensis and K. guimarotae, excluding other Theriosuchus species, was strongly supported, providing further evidence of these two species forming a separate genus. In some trees, T. grandinaris was also close to Knoetschkesuchus. The most parsimonious arrangement is reproduced below.

Instead, the most-parsimonious tree must be found in "tree space" (i.e., amongst all possible trees). For a small number of taxa (i.e., fewer than nine) it is possible to do an exhaustive search, in which every possible tree is scored, and the best one is selected.

The analyses showed four independent prasinophyte groups, in which these lineages represented the earliest divergences among the Chlorophyta. The most parsimonious tree created suggests that the Chlorodendrales lineage is a very early diverging group of “core Chlorophytes,” of which there are four clades. However, the diverging order of this group remains unclear.

The earliest known fossil insects that can be considered holometabolan appear in the Permian strata (approximately 280 Ma). Phylogenetic studies also show that the sister group of Endopterygota is paraneoptera, which includes hemimetabolan species and a number of neometabolan groups. The most parsimonious evolutionary hypothesis is that holometabolans originated from hemimetabolan ancestors.

The family tree with the least amount of these 'steps' (transitions) is likely to be the most accurate, based on the principal of occam's razor (the simplest answer is the most accurate). Bremer support is used to label how well-supported clades are by analyzing how they are distributed among more complex alternatives to the simplest (most parsimonious) tree. Clades which do not exist in a family tree which is only one total step more complex than the MPT (most parsimonious tree) have a Bremer support of 1, meaning that the clade's existence is very uncertain. Even if the MPT of the present analysis supports their existence, new data may make a competing family tree more parsimonious, dissolving clades which are only supported in the current MPT.

Porfiri et al.'s description of Tratayenia prefers this third hypothesis. The cladogram below follows the strict consensus (average result) of the 12 most parsimonious trees (the simplest evolutionary paths, in terms of the total amount of sampled features evolved or lost between sampled taxa) found by Porfiri et al. (2018)'s phylogenetic analysis.

Six genera have been placed in the tribe Haemantheae; all are found in Africa. Molecular phylogenetic analysis carried out in 2004 showed that the tribe is monophyletic (i.e. it contains all the descendants of a single common ancestor). Four species of Clivia were included in the analysis; the single most parsimonious tree is shown below.

In a phylogenetic analysis, Teyujagua was recovered as the sister taxon to Archosauriformes, in a more derived position than the Triassic Prolacerta. Pinheiro et al. performed the analysis using a novel data matrix assembled from two previous studies by Martin D. Ezcurra. Their analysis recovered two most parsimonious trees, both recovering a clade made up of Teyujagua and Archosauriformes.

Log-linear analysis is a technique used in statistics to examine the relationship between more than two categorical variables. The technique is used for both hypothesis testing and model building. In both these uses, models are tested to find the most parsimonious (i.e., least complex) model that best accounts for the variance in the observed frequencies.

An alternative hypothesis suggests evolution from a primate common ancestor capable of vocal learning, with the trait subsequently being lost at least eight other times. Considering the most parsimonious analysis, it seems unlikely that the number of independent gains (one in humans) would be exceeded so greatly by the number of independent losses (at least eight), which supports the independent evolution hypothesis.

Exclusion of other potential means for the introduction of the palm to the region, such as fruit bats or other mechanisms of distribution, left the most parsimonious explanation that it had been subject to dispersal by humans. This accords with the myths of local peoples, which allude to its deliberate introduction, the use as a resource and food, and its maintenance.

Some authors have suggested that it is closely related to Notharctus, while others have argued that its size already exceeded that of primitive Notharctus and therefore was not the most parsimonious phylogeny.Godinot, M. A Summary of Adapiform Systematics and Phylogeny. Folia Primatologica, 1998 These scientists either link Pelycodus with the poorly known Hesperolemur or place it as a terminating branch.

Since C4 photosynthesis is a complex trait, its evolution followed by a reversion to the ancestral type of C3 photosynthesis would represent an exception to Dollo's law. The reversion hypothesis is the most parsimonious explanation of phylogenetic relationships within Alloteropsis. However, direct evidence for the hypothesis, in the form of C4 genes or pseudogenes in the C3 taxon, is currently lacking.Christin, P., et al. (2012).

This branch is then taken to be outside all the other branches of the tree, which together form a monophyletic group. This imparts a sense of relative time to the tree. Incorrect choice of a root can result in incorrect relationships on the tree, even if the tree is itself correct in its unrooted form. Parsimony analysis often returns a number of equally most- parsimonious trees (MPTs).

However, other most parsimonious trees offered the opposite result, with Lectavis being a closer relative of avisaurids than Yungavolucris. Since 1993, additional analyses have broadened the gap between Yungavolucris and avisaurids. Other enantiornitheans, such as Enantiophoenix, Halimornis, and Concornis, have been found to be closer to Avisaurus than either Yungavolucris or Lectavis. A close relationship between the two El Brete taxa and Avisaurus seems highly unlikely.

In 2016, two phylogenetic analyses were conducted based on the dataset from the description of Darwinopterus in order to determine the phylogenetic position of Allkaruen. One analysis was restricted to the holotype braincase, while the other included the holotype mandible and cervical vertebrae as well. Allkaruen was consistently recovered as the sister taxon of the Monofenestrata; the consensus of the 360 most parsimonious trees is shown below.

Genetic analyses have been conducted on B. rossica to determine its phylogeny. There are many ways to phylogenetically classify B. rossica, but scientists from Ohio State University have determined that the family Orobanchaceae is estimated to have originated about 52.2 million years ago. The strongest bootstrap support is for terminal clades. The most parsimonious tree of Boschniakia forms a grade with Conopholis and Epifagus as well as other species of Orobanche.

However, this is only possible for a relatively small number of sequences or species because the problem of identifying the most parsimonious tree is known to be NP-hard; consequently a number of heuristic search methods for optimization have been developed to locate a highly parsimonious tree, if not the best in the set. Most such methods involve a steepest descent-style minimization mechanism operating on a tree rearrangement criterion.

However, the most parsimonious explanation is that the rock was deposited during the fossilisation process after TM 1517 had died. In 1961, science writer Robert Ardrey noted two small holes about 2.5 cm (an inch) apart on the child skullcap SK 54, and believed this individual had been killed by being struck twice on the head in an assault; in 1970, Brain reinterpreted this as evidence of a leopard attack.

However, more recent phylogenetic studies have placed Baurusuchus within Notosuchia once again, although it is still not considered to be a sebecosuchian. In 2012, a phylogenetic study was done to produce supertrees of Crocodyliformes, including 184 species. The most parsimonious trees were highly resolved, meaning the phylogenetic relationships found in the analysis were highly likely. As such, below is the consensus tree from the study, focusing on the Metasuchian branch of the tree.

Benson also concluded it would be most parsimonious to assume that the Stonesfield Slate material represents a single species. If so, several additional distinctive traits can be observed in other parts of the skeleton. The low vertical ridge on the outer side of the ilium, above the hip joint, shows parallel vertical grooves. The bony skirts between the shafts of the ischia are thick and touch each other forming an almost flat surface.

Members of this subfamily had somewhat longer and more tapered snouts than other Rhinesuchids, although (according to Eltink et al..) their pterygoids had short anterior branches, letting the palatine bones contact the interpterygoid vacuities. The most parsimonious (evolutionarily simplest) tree found by Eltink et al. (2016) is seen below: The structure of Rhinesuchidae following Eltink et al.'s study was challenged by a different study on rhinesuchids published less than a year later.

A maximum parsimony analysis runs in a very straightforward fashion. Trees are scored according to the degree to which they imply a parsimonious distribution of the character data. The most parsimonious tree for the dataset represents the preferred hypothesis of relationships among the taxa in the analysis. Trees are scored (evaluated) by using a simple algorithm to determine how many "steps" (evolutionary transitions) are required to explain the distribution of each character.

However, Luo, Kielan-Jaworowska and Cifelli (2002) tested alternative possible phylogenies as well, and found that recovering eutriconodonts outside the crown group of Mammalia required only five additional steps compared to the most parsimonious solution. The authors stated that such placement of eutriconodonts is less likely than their placement within the mammalian crown group, but it cannot be rejected on a statistical basis. The most recent cladogram is by Thomas Martin et al. 2015, in their description of Spinolestes.

Known elements in white and unknown in dark grey. This reconstruction reflects the possible sauropodomorph affinities. Adding Nhandumirim to the second analysis, created by Nesbitt & Ezcurra (2015), led to inconclusive results. In the strict consensus tree (average result of most parsimonious trees), Nhandumirim is part of a broad polytomy at the base of Saurischia, along with several traditional basal theropods, herrerasaurids, and Eoraptor (which, on the other hand, is frenquently considered an early sauropodomorph in most recent analyses).

The authors then go on to suggest that since Tianyuraptor is considered a short-armed microraptorine, more derived long-armed microraptorines might have independently evolved flight capability. However, it is also equally possible, as argued by Zheng et al., that Tianyuraptor may in fact be a basal member of a clade containing all other Laurasian dromaeosaurids with the exception of Microraptorinae. This is indicated by the other 24 out of 30 most parsimonious trees recovered from the analysis.

Due to the peculiar autapomorphies present in this taxon's remains, its affinities are uncertain. It has sometimes been compared to avisaurids, a group of late Cretaceous enantiornitheans which are also primarily known from tarsometatarsals. A small phylogenetic analysis performed during its initial description in 1993 found several most parsimonious trees with conflicting results. Some placed it as a closer relative of avisaurids than Lectavis bretincola (an unusually long- legged enantiornithean discovered in the same deposit) was.

Phylogenetic tree of Pannoniasaurus inexpectatus Analysis by Makádi et al. found three equally most parsimonious trees that placed Pannoniasaurus in a new clade, the Tethysaurinae. The three trees reconstructed Pannoniasaurus as the sister taxon to the clade that includes Tethysaurus nopcsai, Yaguarasaurus columbianus, and Russellosaurus coheni. Tethysaurinae was reconstructed at the base of a clade that includes the aigialosaurs Carsosaurus, Komensaurus, and Haasiasaurus, and the clades that include conventional marine mosasaur-grade mosasauroids such as halisaurs, tylosaurs and plioplatecarpines.

The infected ant then travels outside now mimicking small red berries which are a favorite food of birds. The ant is confused for a berry and is eaten by the bird starting the whole cycle over again. Although bird predation on an infected Cephalotes atratus has not yet been observed, the combination of field experiments and the known natural history of the ant indicate that this is the most parsimonious explanation for transmission of the parasite to new ant colonies.

Specializations caused by the small size of Oculudentavis lead to difficulties in making precise conclusions on its classification. A phylogenetic analysis in the original description supports a basal placement for Oculudentavis within Avialae, only slightly closer to modern birds than Archaeopteryx. This suggests that a ~50 million year ghost lineage exists between the Late Jurassic and the middle of the Cretaceous. A small amount of most parsimonious trees instead suggest that it is an enantiornithean, like other birds preserved in Burmese amber.

Nesbitt found that his most parsimonious results indicated that this genus was the sister taxon of the paracrocodylomorphs, rather than an internal component of the group. However, due to its crushed skeleton obscuring crucial anatomical details, it is also conceivable that Ticinosuchus may actually belong inside Paracrocodylomorpha pending new info. This result has already been recovered by Da-Silva et al. (2019), which places Ticinosuchus as the basalmost loricatan while also sometimes having the recently described suchian Mandasuchus lie outside of the group.

A phylogenetic analysis constructs thousands of family trees, each of which include hundreds of "steps" in evolution where analyzed traits are evolved, lost, or reacquired. The family tree with the fewest "steps", known as the most parsimonious tree (MPT), is generally considered to be the most accurate under the principle of Occam's razor. In the case of this analysis, the MPT considered Colobops to be a basal rhynchosaur. However, some family trees look completely different from the MPT despite only a being few evolutionary steps more complex.

Fabiana imbricata is the type species for the genus Fabiana. A recent analysis of the family Solanaceae by Olmstead and Migid, which included 89 genera and 190 species, including F. imbricata as a representative of the genus Fabiana. This study employed two chloroplast DNA regions (ndhF and trnLF) to provide higher resolution than previous analyses through the development of both a strict consensus based tree, and a most parsimonious tree, illustrating inferred branch lengths. Their analysis placed F. imbricata in the same position in both trees.

Reduced consensus takes this one step further, by showing all subtrees (and therefore all relationships) supported by the input trees. Even if multiple MPTs are returned, parsimony analysis still basically produces a point-estimate, lacking confidence intervals of any sort. This has often been levelled as a criticism, since there is certainly error in estimating the most-parsimonious tree, and the method does not inherently include any means of establishing how sensitive its conclusions are to this error. Several methods have been used to assess support.

The circumstances of his last years invite speculation: the resignation from his various positions and departure from South Australia was accorded the briefest of mentions in the Press; the appointment of this no doubt talented and well-mannered "outsider" as Victorian Registrar-General (which despite protestations by supporters may have been a boondoggle); his unexplained presence (and death) in Hobart, where a funeral was held at his residence, 2 Fitzroy Place, followed by the most parsimonious of obituaries in all three colonies, smack of deferential reticence on the part of the Fourth Estate.

The authors did note that its phylogenetic position is unstable; constraining Epidexipteryx hui as a basal avialan required two additional steps compared to the most parsimonious solution, while constraining it as a basal member of Oviraptorosauria required only one additional step. A separate exploratory analysis included Scansoriopteryx/Epidendrosaurus, which was recovered as a basal member of Avialae; the authors noted that it did not clade with Epidexipteryx, which stayed outside Eumaniraptora. Constraining the monophyly of Scansoriopterygidae required four additional steps and moved Epidexipteryx into Avialae. A monophyletic Scansoriopterygidae was recovered by Godefroit et al.

Functional principal component analysis (FPCA) is a statistical method for investigating the dominant modes of variation of functional data. Using this method, a random function is represented in the eigenbasis, which is an orthonormal basis of the Hilbert space L2 that consists of the eigenfunctions of the autocovariance operator. FPCA represents functional data in the most parsimonious way, in the sense that when using a fixed number of basis functions, the eigenfunction basis explains more variation than any other basis expansion. FPCA can be applied for representing random functions, or in functional regression and classification.

The principle is akin to Occam's razor, which states that—all else being equal—the simplest hypothesis that explains the data should be selected. Some of the basic ideas behind maximum parsimony were presented by James S. Farris in 1970 and Walter M. Fitch in 1971. Maximum parsimony is an intuitive and simple criterion, and it is popular for this reason. However, although it is easy to score a phylogenetic tree (by counting the number of character-state changes), there is no algorithm to quickly generate the most-parsimonious tree.

For nine to twenty taxa, it will generally be preferable to use branch-and-bound, which is also guaranteed to return the best tree. For greater numbers of taxa, a heuristic search must be performed. Because the most-parsimonious tree is always the shortest possible tree, this means that—in comparison to the "true" tree that actually describes the evolutionary history of the organisms under study—the "best" tree according to the maximum-parsimony criterion will often underestimate the actual evolutionary change that has occurred. In addition, maximum parsimony is not statistically consistent.

Life restoration Phylogenetically, Gualicho presents two possibilities; that megaraptorans and neovenatorids were carnosaurs, or that megaraptorans and neovenatorids were a grade of theropods more closely related to coelurosaurs than to carnosaurs. The cladogram below follows a 2016 analysis by Sebastián Apesteguía, Nathan D. Smith, Rubén Juarez Valieri, and Peter J. Makovicky. The cladogram below follows the strict consensus (average result) of the twelve most parsimonious trees (the simplest evolutionary paths, in terms of the total amount of sampled features evolved or lost between sampled taxa) found by Porfiri et al. (2018)'s phylogenetic analysis.

The genuine color of egg spots is a yellow, red or orange inner circle with a colorless ring surrounding the shape. Through phylogenetic analysis, using the mitochondrial ND2 gene, it was hypothesized that the true egg spots evolved in the common ancestor of the Astatoreochromis-lineage and the modern Haplochrominis. This ancestor was most likely riverine in origin, based on the most parsimonious representation of habitat type in the cichlid family. The presence of egg-spots in a turbid riverine environment, would seem particularly beneficial and necessary for intra-species communication.

Eucritta may have been a close relative of baphetids like Loxomma Eucritta was already recognized as a unique animal in its original 1998 description. A phylogenetic analysis provided in the description often found it close to baphetids, but groups at and around the base of crown-Tetrapoda were not stable in their position. The most parsimonious family tree tentatively placed Eucritta and baphetids closer to "anthracosaurs" than to temnospondyls. The more comprehensive 2001 description added the reptile-like tetrapod Gephyrostegus to the 1998 paper's phylogenetic analysis, and made several more edits and corrections.

Kwanasaurus was added into a phylogenetic analysis to test its relationship to other silesaurids. The codings for the taxon were based on both all the Eagle Basin silesaurid material as well as the dinosauromorph tibiae and scapulae which may additionally belong to it. The strict consensus tree (average result of all most parsimonious trees) was poorly resolved, with practically all silesaurids in a polytomy along with ornithischians and sauropodomorphs. The adams consensus tree (in which unstable taxa cluster at the base of the smallest group they are always within) has better resolution.

The first phylogenetic analysis of the caseids containing Ruthenosaurus was made by Romano & Nicosia in 2015. In their most parsimonious analysis including nearly all caseids (to the exclusion of the very fragmentary Alierasaurus ronchi from Sardinia), Ruthenosaurus is found very close to Cotylorhynchus and most specifically to the giant Cotylorhynchus hancocki. However, Romano & Nicosia have concluded that given the large body size of the two taxa and considering the absence of cranial material for Ruthenosaurus, it is possible that their close similarity is size related. Below the most pasimonious phylogenetic analysis published by Romano & Nicosia in 2015.

In disciplines including forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, osteoarchaeology and zooarchaeology Minimum number of individuals, or MNI, refers to the fewest possible number of people or animals in a skeletal assemblage. It is used to determine an estimate of how many people or animals are present in a cluster of bones. The principle of the minimum number of individuals was defined by the North American ethnologist T. E. White in 1953. The principle of MNI accounts for each possible individual human or animal as an individual unit in the most parsimonious way, meaning to count the lowest number of individuals in an archaeological site.

However, there are several major problems with the methane hydrate dissociation hypothesis. The most parsimonious interpretation for surface-water forams to show the excursion before their benthic counterparts (as in the Thomas et al. paper) is that the perturbation occurred from the top down, and not the bottom up. If the anomalous (in whatever form: CH4 or CO2) entered the atmospheric carbon reservoir first, and then diffused into the surface ocean waters, which mix with the deeper ocean waters over much longer time-scales, we would expect to observe the planktonics shifting toward lighter values before the benthics.

Based on Brink's analysis of skull and lower jaw features in 1963, Bauria is a therapsid sufficiently different from Scaloposaurus and its allies to warrant distinction at the infraorder level. It was suggested that a suborder be recognized level with Gorgonopsia, Therocephalia, Cynodontia and Ictidosauria and that this suborder be called Scaloposauria. The suborder Scaloposauria should be divided into two infraorders, the earlier Ictodosuchoidea and the later Bauriamorpha, a natural branch separate from the suborder Cynodontia. Bauria was later confirmed to be a sister taxon of cynodonts, followed by an outgroup formed by (Moschorhinus (Ictidosuchops, Theriognathus)), using techniques involving Most Parsimonious Trees.

This stems from the fact that Neanderthal ancestry shared with Africans had been masked, because Africans were thought to have no Neanderthal admixture and were therefore used as reference samples. Thus, any overlap in Neanderthal admixture with Africans resulted in an underestimation of Neanderthal admixture in non-Africans and especially in Europeans. The authors give a single pulse of Neanderthal admixture after the out-of-Africa dispersal as the most parsimonious explanation for the enrichment in East Asians, but they add that variation in Neanderthal ancestry may also be attributed to dilution to account for the now-more-modest differences found.

A simple way of defining the bound is a maximum number of assumed evolutionary changes allowed per tree. A set of criteria known as Zharkikh's rules severely limit the search space by defining characteristics shared by all candidate "most parsimonious" trees. The two most basic rules require the elimination of all but one redundant sequence (for cases where multiple observations have produced identical data) and the elimination of character sites at which two or more states do not occur in at least two species. Under ideal conditions these rules and their associated algorithm would completely define a tree.

As noted below, theoretical and simulation work has demonstrated that this is likely to sacrifice accuracy rather than improve it. Although these taxa may generate more most- parsimonious trees (see below), methods such as agreement subtrees and reduced consensus can still extract information on the relationships of interest. It has been observed that inclusion of more taxa tends to lower overall support values (bootstrap percentages or decay indices, see below). The cause of this is clear: as additional taxa are added to a tree, they subdivide the branches to which they attach, and thus dilute the information that supports that branch.

Scadoxus is placed in tribe Haemantheae within the subfamily Amaryllidoideae, a tribe reserved for genera with fruit in the form of berries (baccate fruit). The tribe is predominantly African in origin and comprises six genera: Apodolirion, Gethyllis, Haemanthus, Scadoxus, Clivia and Cryptostephanus. The single most parsimonious phylogenetic tree found by analysis of both nuclear and plastid DNA in a 2004 study showed that Scadoxus is most closely related to Haemanthus: Scadoxus was originally separated from Haemanthus by Rafinesque in 1838. His type species, Scadoxus multiflorus, had been described as Haemanthus multiflorus by Thomas Martyn in 1795.

In 2017, Arbour and Evans placed Zuul within the Ankylosauridae, based on a phylogenetic analysis. More specifically, they identified it as an ankylosaurin ankylosaurine ankylosaurid, forming a clade with Ankylosaurus, Anodontosaurus, Dyoplosaurus and Scolosaurus. Although the consensus of the phylogenetic trees recovered by the analysis was inconclusive regarding the interrelationships of ankylosaurins, this was influenced mainly by the relative placements of Anodontosaurus and Ziapelta within the tree. Out of the ten most parsimonious trees they recovered, nine of them have Zuul as the sister group of Dyoplosaurus, while in the remaining tree Zuul is closer to Anodontosaurus.

It was considered that the most parsimonious explanation for its presence was that its low abundance meant it had been previously overlooked as a member of the Lake Rukwa ichthyofauna rather than deliberate introduction. Its natural habitats are rivers, freshwater lakes, and inland deltas over rock substrates. It feeds on aufwuchs as well as a variety of food collected from rocky river or lake beds including insects, ostracods, diatoms and worms. It is threatened by habitat loss caused by increased turbidity of the water due to deforestation increasing sediment runoff in the catchments of the lake's tributary rivers.

Piscivory, or a diet based solely on fish, is likely the primitive condition for Cetacea, and it seems most parsimonious that Aetiocetus fed like an archaeocete, locating fish without the use of echolocation. However, an argument exists that Aetiocetus was in fact a bulk feeder, who fed by gulping and straining prey from the water through their interlocking cusped cheek teeth. This is supported by the presence of a lack of mandibular symphysis, meaning the jaw was loosely articulated, and by the presence of the wide palate. This feeding method has an analog in crab-eater seals.

The most parsimonious explanation for this is that all lemurs are derived from a single ancestor that rafted from Africa to Madagascar during the Paleogene. Similarities in dentition between aye-ayes and several African primate fossils (Plesiopithecus and Propotto) have led to the alternate theory that the ancestors of aye-ayes colonized Madagascar separately from other lemurs. In 2008, Russell Mittermeier, Colin Groves, and others ignored addressing higher- level taxonomy by defining lemurs as monophyletic and containing five living families, including Daubentoniidae. Further evidence indicating that the aye- aye belongs in the superfamily Lemuroidea can be inferred from the presence of petrosal bullae encasing the ossicles of the ear.

The specimen finally received a formal name in early 2018, when a group led by Adam Pritchard provided new preparation and discussion of the skull, as well as giving it the name Colobops noviportensis. This study also included CT-scans of the specimen, proportional and numerical analyses of the enlarged temporal region, and a phylogenetic analysis in order to determine its relations. The most parsimonious results of the phylogenetic analysis indicated that the reptile was a basal rhynchosaur, although the analysis also showed that a position within Rhynchocephalia was only slightly less likely to be true. A 2020 reinterpretation by Torsten Scheyer et al.

Under the interpretation that Colobops is a basal rhynchosaur, it would have been closely related to this reptile, Mesosuchus In order to determine which reptile group Colobops truly belonged to, its describers (Pritchard et al.) included it within a phylogenetic analysis. Their analysis was a modified version of one originally designed by Pritchard & Nesbitt (2017) to test the affinities of the beaked drepanosaur Avicranium. With Colobops incorporated into the analysis and several character scores updated, the most parsimonious tree found that Colobops was an archosauromorph as the earliest diverging member of Rhynchosauria. This position was supported by three features of the snout and one feature of the supratemporal area.

In 1945, George Gaylord Simpson used traditional taxonomic techniques to group these spectacularly diverse mammals in the superorder he named Paenungulata ("almost ungulates"), but there were many loose threads in unravelling their genealogy. For example, hyraxes in his Paenungulata had some characteristics suggesting they might be connected to the Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates, such as horses and rhinos). Indeed, early taxonomists placed the Hyracoidea closest to the rhinoceroses because of their dentition. When genetic techniques were developed for inspecting amino acid differences among haemoglobin sequences the most parsimonious cladograms depicted Simpson's Paenungulata as an authentic clade and as one of the first groups to diversify from the basal placental mammals (Eutheria).

There are several other methods for inferring phylogenies based on discrete character data, including maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference. Each offers potential advantages and disadvantages. In practice, these methods tend to favor trees that are very similar to the most parsimonious tree(s) for the same dataset; however, they allow for complex modelling of evolutionary processes, and as classes of methods are statistically consistent and are not susceptible to long-branch attraction. Note, however, that the performance of likelihood and Bayesian methods are dependent on the quality of the particular model of evolution employed; an incorrect model can produce a biased result - just like parsimony.

There does not appear to be an orbital process present on either bone, and the modifications of the proximal condyle permitting wide range of motion against the squamosal, are not readily apparent. Furthermore, the quadratojugal and jugal appear far more robust in the Protoavis specimens themselves, than represented by Chatterjee. The size and development of the quadratojugal seems to contradict Chatterjee's assertion that this bone contacted the quadrate via a highly mobile pin joint. These data render the assertion of prokinesis in the skull of Protoavis questionable at best, and it seems most parsimonious to conclude that the specimen displays a conventional opisthostylic quadrate.

While it is difficult to determine if a parasitehost switch occurred in evolutionary history, this explanation is the most parsimonious (containing the fewest evolutionary changes). Additionally, the DNA differences between head lice and body lice provide corroborating evidence that humans used clothing between 80,000 and 170,000 years ago, before leaving Africa. Human head and body lice occupy distinct ecological zones: head lice live and feed on the scalp, while body lice live on clothing and feed on the body. Because body lice require clothing to survive, the divergence of head and body lice from their common ancestor provides an estimate of the date of introduction of clothing in human evolutionary history.

Epidexipteryx was recovered as basal paravian that didn't belong to Eumaniraptora. The authors did note that its phylogenetic position is unstable; constraining Epidexipteryx hui as a basal avialan required two additional steps compared to the most parsimonious solution, while constraining it as a basal member of Oviraptorosauria required only one additional step. Life restoration, showing the animal without arm membranes A separate exploratory analysis included Scansoriopteryx/Epidendrosaurus, which was recovered as a basal member of Avialae; the authors noted that it did not clade with Epidexipteryx, which stayed outside Eumaniraptora. Constraining the monophyly of Scansoriopterygidae required four additional steps and moved Epidexipteryx into Avialae.

Maximum parsimony (MP) is a method of identifying the potential phylogenetic tree that requires the smallest total number of evolutionary events to explain the observed sequence data. Some ways of scoring trees also include a "cost" associated with particular types of evolutionary events and attempt to locate the tree with the smallest total cost. This is a useful approach in cases where not every possible type of event is equally likely - for example, when particular nucleotides or amino acids are known to be more mutable than others. The most naive way of identifying the most parsimonious tree is simple enumeration - considering each possible tree in succession and searching for the tree with the smallest score.

A homoplasy is a character state that is shared by two or more taxa due to some cause other than common ancestry. The two main types of homoplasy are convergence (evolution of the "same" character in at least two distinct lineages) and reversion (the return to an ancestral character state). Characters that are obviously homoplastic, such as white fur in different lineages of Arctic mammals, should not be included as a character in a phylogenetic analysis as they do not contribute anything to our understanding of relationships. However, homoplasy is often not evident from inspection of the character itself (as in DNA sequence, for example), and is then detected by its incongruence (unparsimonious distribution) on a most-parsimonious cladogram.

According to Behar, the most parsimonious explanation for this shared Middle Eastern ancestry is that it is "consistent with the historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World". North African, Italian and others of Iberian origin show variable frequencies of admixture with non-Jewish historical host populations among the maternal lines. In the case of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (in particular Moroccan Jews), who are closely related, the source of non-Jewish admixture is mainly southern European, while Mizrahi Jews show evidence of admixture with other Middle Eastern populations. Behar et al.

The result of this study revealed that all major cladistic trees generated from the data suggested that the genus Oreostylidium is nested within the genus Stylidium. Based on that data, the authors of that study proposed that O. subulatum be known once again under its very first name, Stylidium subulatum and Oreostylidium should be reduced to synonymy of Stylidium. In 2002, another study based on molecular evidence determined that in the most parsimonious cladistic tree, Stylidium graminifolium and O. subulatum were closely related, with O. subulatum again nested within Stylidium. Based on molecular clock calculations and their data, the researchers concluded that S. graminifolium and O. subulatum shared a common ancestor about 3 million years ago.

The most parsimonious explanation for cases of autism where a single child is affected and there is no family history or affected siblings is that a single spontaneous mutation that impacts one or multiple genes is a significant contributing factor. Tens of individual genes or mutations have been definitively identified and are cataloged by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Examples of autism that has arisen from a rare or de novo mutation in a single-gene or locus include the neurodevelopmental disorders fragile X syndrome, 22q13 deletion syndrome, and 16p11.2 deletion syndrome. These mutations themselves are characterized by considerable variability in clinical outcome and typically only a subset of mutation carriers meet criteria for autism.

If these relationships had been correct, the dates of these fossils would have had implications on the colonization of Madagascar, requiring two separate events. The most parsimonious explanation, given the genetic evidence and the absence of toothcombed primates in European fossil sites, is that stem strepsirrhines evolved on the Afro-Arabian landmass, dispersing to Madagascar and more recently from Africa to Asia. More recently, the structure and general presence of the toothcomb in Bugtilemur has been questioned, as well as many other dental features, suggesting it is most likely an adapiform. An alternative form of oceanic dispersal that had been considered was island hopping, where the lemur ancestors might have made it to Madagascar in small steps by colonizing exposed seamounts during times of low sea level.

McDowell stated "species diversity is greatest in Africa, but the Asiatic Bungarus and Ophiophagus are each so peculiar in anatomy as to suggest an ancient divergence". Others, including Slowinski, believed that the kraits (Bungarus), are part of a clade that clusters with a group including the king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) and oddly enough, with the African mambas (Dendroaspis) on the most-parsimonious tree or with Elapsoidea on the maximum- likelihood tree. This result calls into question the monophyly of cobras and underscores the uncertainty of the homology of the hood spreading behavior in cobras and mambas. The relationships of Dendroaspis, Ophiophagus, and Bungarus differed between the parsimony and likelihood analyses, suggesting that more work is necessary to resolve the relationships of these problematic taxa.

For example, consider a phylogeny recovered for a genus of plants containing 6 species A - F, where each plant is pollinated by either a "bee", "hummingbird" or "wind". One obvious question is what the pollinators at deeper nodes were in the phylogeny of this genus of plants. Under maximum parsimony, an ancestral state reconstruction for this clade reveals that "hummingbird" is the most parsimonious ancestral state for the lower clade (plants D, E, F), that the ancestral states for the nodes in the top clade (plants A, B, C) are equivocal and that both "hummingbird" or "bee" pollinators are equally plausible for the pollination state at the root of the phylogeny. Supposing we have strong evidence from the fossil record that the root state is "hummingbird".

A response to this study was published in 2020, where it was suggested that the structures seen on the anurognathids were actually a result of the decomposition of aktinofibrils: a type of fibre used to strengthen and stiffen the wing. However, in a response to this, the authors of the 2018 paper point to the fact that the presence of the structures extend past the patagium, and the presence of both aktinofibrils and filaments on Jeholopterus ningchengensis and Sordes pilosus. The various forms of filament structure present on the anurognathids in the 2018 study would also require a form of decomposition that would cause the different 'filament' forms seen. They therefore conclude that the most parsimonious interpretation of the structures is that they are filamentous proto-feathers.

In a 2003 paper "A Dialog on Quantum Gravity", Carlo Rovelli regards the fact LQG is formulated in 4 dimensions and without supersymmetry as a strength of the theory as it represents the most parsimonious explanation, consistent with current experimental results, over its rival string/M-theory. Proponents of string theory will often point to the fact that, among other things, it demonstrably reproduces the established theories of general relativity and quantum field theory in the appropriate limits, which loop quantum gravity has struggled to do. In that sense string theory's connection to established physics may be considered more reliable and less speculative, at the mathematical level. Loop quantum gravity has nothing to say about the matter (fermions) in the universe.

Some controversial taxa thus had to be omitted by the subtree in order for the resulting cladogram to fulfill the second requirement. The biogeographical tree (i.e. the following cladogram) is basically the 50% majority rule tree, except with some of the polytomies resolved according to the results of the maximum agreement subtree: The following cladogram is based on a 2017 phylogenetic analysis of the Ankylosaurinae conducted by Victoria Arbour and David Evans. The cladogram depicts the majority rule (average result) of 10 most parsimonious trees, which each are considered to have the fewest evolutionary steps, thus being the most accurate under the principle of Occam's razor: Reconstructed skeleton based on S. thronus holotype specimen ROM 1930 Life restoration of Scolosaurus cutleri.

The mechanism of PFS is hypothesized to involve synchronization of several independent object-encoding neuronal ensembles (objectNEs). When objectNEs fire out-of-sync, the objects are perceived one at a time. However, once those objectNEs are time-shifted by the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) to fire in-phase with each other, they are consciously experienced as one unified object or scene. The synchronization hypothesis has never been directly tested but is indirectly supported by several lines of experimental evidence. Furthermore, it is the most parsimonious way to explain the formation of new imaginary memories since the same mechanism of Hebbian learning (“neurons that fire together wire together”) that is responsible for externally-driven sensory memories of objects and scenes can be also responsible for memorizing internally-constructed novel images, such as plans and engineering designs.

Basal Eurasians may have less Neanderthal ancestry than other ancestral Eurasian lineages, and the extent to which Basal Eurasian ancestry is present may explain the extent to which Neanderthal ancestry is present in Middle Eastern genomes. For example, a high level of Basal Eurasian or Sub-Saharan African ancestry could be the underlying reason for the low level of Neanderthal ancestry in Qatari Bedouin in comparison to Europeans or other Middle Eastern populations. The most parsimonious explanations for similar or less Neanderthal introgression in Middle Eastern populations, compared to other Eurasian populations, are the presence of Sub-Saharan African ancestry as well as the presence of Basal Eurasian ancestry, which has little to no signatures of Neanderthal introgression. Bedouin, who have the greatest amount of autochthonous Arab genetic ancestry, may be the direct descendants of Basal Eurasians.

In fact, it has been shown that the bootstrap percentage, as an estimator of accuracy, is biased, and that this bias results on average in an underestimate of confidence (such that as little as 70% support might really indicate up to 95% confidence). However, the direction of bias cannot be ascertained in individual cases, so assuming that high values bootstrap support indicate even higher confidence is unwarranted. Another means of assessing support is Bremer support, or the decay index which is a parameter of a given data set, rather than an estimate based on pseudoreplicated subsamples, as are the bootstrap and jackknife procedures described above. Bremer support (also known as branch support) is simply the difference in number of steps between the score of the MPT(s), and the score of the most parsimonious tree that does not contain a particular clade (node, branch).

They created their own data matrix and through it found that many groups of ceratopsians could be supported, and that Aquilops was a basal neoceratopsian that could potentially be a protoceratopsid, leptoceratopsid, or ceratopsid, although any one of these groups would have a large ghost lineage with Aquilops. Ajkaceratops was identified as a wildcard taxon that could either place close to Ceratopsoidea or as a very basal neoceratopsian, despite being from the middle Late Cretaceous. All previously published neoceratopsian phylogenetic analyses were incorporated into the analysis of Eric M. Morschhauser and colleagues in 2019, along with all previously published diagnostic species excluding the incomplete juvenile Archaeoceratops yujingziensis and the problematic genera Bainoceratops, Lamaceratops, Platyceratops and Gobiceratops that are very closely related to and potentially synonymous with Bagaceratops. While there were many unresolved areas of the strict consensus, including all of Leptoceratopsidae, a single most parsimonious tree was found that was most consistent with the relative ages of the taxa included, which is shown below.

They also found it most parsimonious to assign the skull to B. altithorax itself rather than an unspecified species, as there is no evidence of other brachiosaurid taxa in the Morrison Formation (and adding this and other possible elements to a phylogenetic analysis did not change the position of B. altithorax). Scapulocoracoid BYU 9462 has been seen as a possible Brachiosaurus bone; it was originally assigned to Ultrasauros (now a junior synonym of Supersaurus), Museum of Ancient Life A shoulder blade with coracoid from Dry Mesa Quarry, Colorado, is one of the specimens at the center of the Supersaurus/Ultrasauros issue of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, James A. Jensen described disarticulated sauropod remains from the quarry as belonging to several exceptionally large taxa, including the new genera Supersaurus and Ultrasaurus, the latter renamed Ultrasauros shortly thereafter because another sauropod had already received the name. Later study showed that the "ultrasaur" material mostly belonged to Supersaurus, though the shoulder blade did not.

Although less parsimonious than recent gene flow, the observation may have been due to ancient population sub-structure in Africa, causing incomplete genetic homogenization within modern humans when Neanderthals diverged while early ancestors of Eurasians were still more closely related to Neanderthals than those of Africans to Neanderthals. On the basis of allele frequency spectrum, it was shown that the recent admixture model had the best fit to the results while the ancient population sub-structure model had no fit–demonstrating that the best model was a recent admixture event that was preceded by a bottleneck event among modern humans—thus confirming recent admixture as the most parsimonious and plausible explanation for the observed excess of genetic similarities between modern non-African humans and Neanderthals. On the basis of linkage disequilibrium patterns, a recent admixture event is likewise confirmed by the data. From the extent of linkage disequilibrium, it was estimated that the last Neanderthal gene flow into early ancestors of Europeans occurred 47,000–65,000 years BP. In conjunction with archaeological and fossil evidence, the gene flow is thought likely to have occurred somewhere in Western Eurasia, possibly the Middle East.