A new phylogeneticist blogger

I’d like to advertise a newcomer among bloggers in phylogenetics: Nicolas Lartillot, now a researcher in Lyon. Nicolas just started blogging a couple of weeks ago but, judging from the number of posts he has already contributed, he seems bound to become a very prolific blogger.

Nicolas has made several noteworthy contributions to the field of phylogenetics, in particular Bayesian phylogenetics. For instance he has developed the CAT model of protein evolution, which seems to be more resilient against the Long Branch Attraction artifact, he has proposed Thermodynamic Integration for computing Bayes factors, he has developed a model for investigating correlations between continuous traits and rates of molecular evolution along a phylogeny, and he maintains the PhyloBayes package.

His blog is called “The Bayesian kitchen”, which I believe means that, underneath the nice theoretical properties of Bayesian inference, a fair amount of cooking is sometimes necessary to get things to work. So far his posts have been about the Bayesian/frequentist divide, about the philosophy of Bayesian inference, or about the interpretation of posterior probabilities, among other things. He uses examples from phylogenetics (e.g. dating, diversification models, ), comparative methods, or gene tree-species tree methods) or population genetics to help make his points. I’m certain I’m going to learn a lot from his posts, and I believe some of the readers of this blog will enjoy them too!