Concatenation versus coalescence versus “concatalescence”

Abstract

By using coalescence analyses of published genomic data (447 genes, 36 mammals), Song et al. (1) concluded that a recent mammalian phylogeny published in Science (2) is inadequate because of “insufficient” data (26 genes, 35,603 bp, 164 mammals), and that “incongruence introduced by concatenation methods is a major cause of long-standing uncertainty in the phylogeny of eutherian mammals.” We instead argue that Song et al.’s approach is flawed.