Foundations of Phylogenetic Inference
{'Code': '08080301', 'Directorate': {'Abbreviation': 'BIO', 'LongName': 'Direct For Biological Sciences'}, 'Division': {'Abbreviation': 'DBI', 'LongName': 'Div Of Biological Infrastructure'}}
{'SignBlockName': 'Alicia Armstrong', 'PO_EMAI': 'aarmstro@nsf.gov', 'PO_PHON': '7032924743'}
The discipline of systematics attempts to reconstruct phylogenetic              relationships among species from data concerning their similarity and           difference.  Over the past two decades, there has been a vigorous debate        among biologists as to which methods ought to be used to make these             inferences to species relationships.  The principal methods discussed           are: the phenetic methods (which use the overall similarity of a pair of        taxa as a measure of the closeness of their descent), the cladistic             parsimony (which uses similarity of derived, not ancestral, characters          as evidence), compatibility methods (which discard characters according         to a certain recipe and then use cladistic parsimony), and explicitly           statistical methods (primarily maximum likelihood techniques).  These           methods sometimes disagree with each other as to which phylogenetic             hypothesis is best supported by given data, and thus biologists have            constructed defenses of their own preferred methods and criticisms of           rival approaches. Dr. Sober, under this grant, will complete his efforts        at clarifying the issues involved and developing an epistemological             framework for understanding the problem of phylogenetic inference.              Philosophical issues addressed include the role of parsimony in                 nondeductive inference, the conditions under which postulating a common         cause for two events is preferable to postulating separate causes, and          the relevance of asymptotic criteria (like statistical consistency) to          the problem of likelihood inference.  This study promises to be of great        interest both to systematic biology and the philosophical foundations of        biology.
{'FirstName': 'Elliott', 'LastName': 'Sober', 'PI_MID_INIT': None, 'PI_SUFX_NAME': None, 'PI_FULL_NAME': 'Elliott Sober', 'EmailAddress': 'ersober@.wisc.edu', 'NSF_ID': '000233397', 'StartDate': '07/01/1987', 'EndDate': None, 'RoleCode': 'Principal Investigator'}
{'Name': 'University of Wisconsin-Madison', 'CityName': 'MADISON', 'ZipCode': '537151218', 'PhoneNumber': '6082623822', 'StreetAddress': '21 N PARK ST STE 6301', 'StreetAddress2': None, 'CountryName': 'United States', 'StateName': 'Wisconsin', 'StateCode': 'WI', 'CONGRESSDISTRICT': '02', 'CONGRESS_DISTRICT_ORG': 'WI02', 'ORG_UEI_NUM': 'LCLSJAGTNZQ7', 'ORG_LGL_BUS_NAME': 'UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SYSTEM', 'ORG_PRNT_UEI_NUM': None}
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{'Code': '1353', 'Text': 'Hist & Philosophy of SET'}
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