Statement of Purpose
We want to bring researchers from across Harvard - botanists and zoologists, theoreticians and empiricists - together to discuss current developments in phylogenetics. Our interests are broad, from phylogenetic inference itself to comparative methods. We will aim to discuss everything from character coding, to alignment methods, from assembling large data sets, to ancestral state reconstruction. In selecting a paper for the journal club, keep in mind that our focus is on methods and theory. Empirical papers are more than welcome, but try to select those which use methods in novel ways or in someway push the field ahead. If you don't know where to start looking, see our "Links" page for a list of journals that provide good phylogenetics ph-odder (though we are certainly not limited to these journals!). Graduate students, postdocs, undergraduates, and visiting scholars are all welcome, regardless of prior experience in phylogenetics.