I put up kind of a ridiculous title. But I do hope that at some point in the near future we’ll have some of the same flavor of debates on the macroevolutionary time scale that we have on the human microevolutionary time scale. There’ll be a surfeit of sequence at nearly every node of interest on the tree of life, and computational power galore devoted to analyzing variation and reconstructing any phylogeny we can conceive of. To be fair, one could argue we aren’t there even with human phylogenetics either. But it is rather strange we’re debating the origin of mammals and the nature of the lineage’s phylogenetic tree at this time. This is the kind of thing that I hope a more robust and assertive molecular phylogenetics can resolve (and paleontology as well, but I’m not up on the latest in computational analysis of morphological characters).
In any case, here’s a cool manuscript up at arXiv, A phylogenomic perspective on the radiation of ray-finned fishes based upon targeted sequencing of ultraconserved elements:
Ray-finned fishes constitute the dominant radiation of vertebrates with over 30,000 species. Although molecular phylogenetics has begun to disentangle major evolutionary relationships within this vast section of …