Extract

The study of biological evolution is a rich source of statistical, mathematical, and computational problems. The last two decades have seen a gradual change from a situation where a mix of paleontology and genetics was the ideal approach to evolution, to a more exclusive position of molecular phylogenetics with its heavy mathematics and statistics to fill this role. A symptom of this changing paradigm is the rapid accumulation of molecular data: the number of DNA sequences in publicly accessible databases has reached 100 billion bases in August 2005, and has continued to increase at a fast rate since then. The simultaneous increase in computer performance has led mathematicians and computer scientists to develop methods and tools to digest these enormous databases in order to address evolutionary issues. Gascuel and Steel invited leaders in these issues to a meeting in Paris in June 2005. The present book is the result of written contributions from this meeting. The introduction by the Editors states an ambitious goal: to present recent models to reconstruct evolution, “their biological relevance, their mathematical basis, their properties, and the algorithms for applying them to data.”

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