[Taxacom] methodological plurality

[Dan Lahr]

Hi Kip,

Regarding:


> What priors should be used for phylogeny is an interesting issue I would
> like to see further explored.
>

I have only seem some attempts at this that seemed to make sense by Mark
Pagel.  He uses a likelihood surface and some other smart guesses to try
and narrow down where the possible answer should be.  In other words, he
gets a "feel" for the data by exploring it using likelihood methods, and
then moves to a BI framework.

Seems interesting, but also seems circular - use likelihood to estimate
parameters then use estimated parameters as priors for  likelihood
analysis. But I may be wrong my math skills don?t go so far.

I honestly have never seen anything more palpable than this, but would love
to.

Dan


-- 
___________________
Daniel J. G. Lahr, PhD
Dept of Zoology, Univ. of Sao Paulo, Brazil