Report on the Willi Hennig Society workshop “Phylogenetic Analysis: Theory and Practice” at the Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

Abstract

The Willi Hennig Society workshop ‘‘Phylogenetic Analysis: Theory and Practice’’ was held at the Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences, in the Czech Republic in Pru_honice near Prague in September 4–7, 2006. The workshop brought together leading scientists in the field of cladistics to teach students principles and methods of phylogenetic analysis. The course consisted of three parts, theoretical, practical and a conference. The first two parts were more formal and as a course they were restricted to a limited number of participants, while the third part was open to the scientific public. This workshop highlighted the theoretical and practical aspects of cladistics, phylogenetics and systematics as a whole. Although western Europe is the home of the father of cladistics, Willi Hennig, and phylogenetic thinking and methodology have deep roots here; cladistic methods are not so widely used nowadays. We are not providing detailed evidence for this statement, but a simple comparison of the phylogenetic articles in the last 4 years of Cladistics shows that more than 68% of these articles are from North American (41%) and Scandinavian (27%) authors. One of the main missions of the Willi Hennig Society is to disseminate interest in cladistics worldwide, and our Czech workshop was a forceful attempt to promote cladistics outside North America and Scandinavia. The workshop was held in the countryside south-east of Prague, in the beautiful chateau of Pru_honice, the home of Institute of Botany, which is part of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Authors of the report opened the course with an introduction from the Director of the Institute of Botany ASCR. The first author organized the workshop entirely. Presentations at the workshop were given by five leading scientists in cladistics Dr James M. Carpenter, Dr Pablo A. Goloboff, Dr Kevin C. Nixon, Dr John W. Wenzel and Dr Ward C. Wheeler. The course enrolled 28 participants from eight European countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and Spain), mostly PhD students and postdoctorates. Further workshops would be extremely useful in disseminating cladistic thinking, and the understanding of phylogenetic methods to the broadest audience of European students and scientists. The workshop addressed cladistic methods because ‘‘they best satisfy the challenges of dealing with a fountain of modern evolutionary data’’, and offered participants a fruitful conceptual framework for thinking about the phylogenetic analysis. The course focused on instruction in phylogenetic methods, mainly parsimony analysis; however, likelihood and Bayesian methods were also extensively discussed. The course was generally geared toward a student audience with some background in phylogenetics. The program also consisted of welcoming dinner and other informal sessions to discuss and share theoretical knowledge of different approaches of phylogenetic reconstruction. Theoretical parts of the course provided a background to the practical parts that followed. The first lecture, given by K. Nixon, was a general introduction to systematics from Darwin to Hennig, summarizing fundamental mechanics of reconstructing the pattern of evolutionary history. The rest of the course focused on parsimony analysis as a general topic. The second lecture, given by P. Goloboff, was oriented towards character optimization and tree searches. W. Wheeler’s first lecture addressed direct (dynamic) optimization as *Corresponding author: E-mail address: drabkova@ibot.cas.cz