Abstract
We give an explicit construction to solve a conjecture of Mike Steel and David Penny that any phylogeny involving N taxa can be recovered unambiguously using on the order of log N binary characters and the method of maximum parsimony. Biologically, this means that homoplasy need not be a deterrent to parsimony methods. Some patterns of homoplasy are phylogenetically informative and can exponentially reduce the amount of data needed to resolve a phylogeny.
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Chai, J., Housworth, E.A. On the Number of Binary Characters Needed to Recover a Phylogeny Using Maximum Parsimony. Bull Math Biol 73, 1398–1411 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-010-9579-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-010-9579-3