Jan De Laet
@jandelaet.bsky.social
Biologist, ICT professional, amateur runner and #tenorhorn player.
www.anagallis.be
www.anagallis.be
No such thing as a free lunch: a note on what 'natural' means in the Phylogenetic Minimum Description Length optimality criterion and how PMDL relocates substantive assumptions into the chosen description language onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Description languages as modelling decisions: A comment on Wheeler and Varón (2025)
Wheeler and Varón (2025) proposed phylogenetic minimum description length (PMDL) as a phylogenetic optimality criterion grounded in algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity. PMDL applies the minimum descr...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
April 18, 2026 at 5:54 AM
No such thing as a free lunch: a note on what 'natural' means in the Phylogenetic Minimum Description Length optimality criterion and how PMDL relocates substantive assumptions into the chosen description language onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Reposted by Jan De Laet
How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:
merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...
merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...
Unfalsifiable by Design: A Year of Trying and Failing to Reproduce a Human Microbiome and Autism Study
The myth of open data, reproducibility, responsibility, and accountability in science, and your role in it
merenlab.org
April 16, 2026 at 7:15 AM
How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism:
merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...
merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...
Reposted by Jan De Laet
🧵 (2/3)
To resolve the history of these large-sized #mammals, we integrate a dependency-coded matrix of 54 discrete characters and 42 morphogeometric and 5 continuous characters, across a sample of 37 taxa.
✅ 5 major lineages recovered
✅ Character weight ranking
✅ Ancestral reconstructions
To resolve the history of these large-sized #mammals, we integrate a dependency-coded matrix of 54 discrete characters and 42 morphogeometric and 5 continuous characters, across a sample of 37 taxa.
✅ 5 major lineages recovered
✅ Character weight ranking
✅ Ancestral reconstructions
April 3, 2026 at 1:27 PM
🧵 (2/3)
To resolve the history of these large-sized #mammals, we integrate a dependency-coded matrix of 54 discrete characters and 42 morphogeometric and 5 continuous characters, across a sample of 37 taxa.
✅ 5 major lineages recovered
✅ Character weight ranking
✅ Ancestral reconstructions
To resolve the history of these large-sized #mammals, we integrate a dependency-coded matrix of 54 discrete characters and 42 morphogeometric and 5 continuous characters, across a sample of 37 taxa.
✅ 5 major lineages recovered
✅ Character weight ranking
✅ Ancestral reconstructions
Reposted by Jan De Laet
🧵 (1/3)
What makes South American Ungulates so unique?🦏🍃 #FossilFriday
Check out our new comprehensive combined-evidence #phylogeny of #Toxodontidae!!! #Paleontology #Evolution #Fossils #Argentina #CONICET
doi.org/10.1111/cla....
What makes South American Ungulates so unique?🦏🍃 #FossilFriday
Check out our new comprehensive combined-evidence #phylogeny of #Toxodontidae!!! #Paleontology #Evolution #Fossils #Argentina #CONICET
doi.org/10.1111/cla....
April 3, 2026 at 1:27 PM
🧵 (1/3)
What makes South American Ungulates so unique?🦏🍃 #FossilFriday
Check out our new comprehensive combined-evidence #phylogeny of #Toxodontidae!!! #Paleontology #Evolution #Fossils #Argentina #CONICET
doi.org/10.1111/cla....
What makes South American Ungulates so unique?🦏🍃 #FossilFriday
Check out our new comprehensive combined-evidence #phylogeny of #Toxodontidae!!! #Paleontology #Evolution #Fossils #Argentina #CONICET
doi.org/10.1111/cla....
Reposted by Jan De Laet
AI perpetuates knowledge artefacts. Mind you, a look at PubMed will tell you that humans are pretty good at perpetuating these too.. theconversation.com/a-weird-phra... ht @cyrilpedia.bsky.social
A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data
Once errors creep into the AI knowledge base, they can be very hard to get out.
theconversation.com
April 28, 2025 at 2:28 PM
AI perpetuates knowledge artefacts. Mind you, a look at PubMed will tell you that humans are pretty good at perpetuating these too.. theconversation.com/a-weird-phra... ht @cyrilpedia.bsky.social
A new morphological phylogeny of Malacostraca comparing the application of character dependencies and implied weighting - Grams - Cladistics - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
A new morphological phylogeny of Malacostraca comparing the application of character dependencies and implied weighting
Using a new character matrix composed of revised matrices of previous analyses and new morphological findings, the phylogeny of Malacostraca (Pancrustacea) is analysed anew with 207 characters for 35...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
April 7, 2025 at 11:51 AM
A new morphological phylogeny of Malacostraca comparing the application of character dependencies and implied weighting - Grams - Cladistics - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
In onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Pol & Ezcurra present a fully scripted (TNT & R, incl. publication-ready graphics) #parsimony based workflow for estimating rates. It deals with ambiguous optimizations and multiple MPTs and can use different calibration approaches. Nice work! #phylogeny
Cladistic estimates of evolutionary rates focused on palaeontological datasets using TNT
We describe a protocol for estimating evolutionary rates from phylogenetic trees based on parsimony character optimization. The rate estimation is conducted through a TNT script and the results are a...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
February 5, 2025 at 11:14 AM
In onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Pol & Ezcurra present a fully scripted (TNT & R, incl. publication-ready graphics) #parsimony based workflow for estimating rates. It deals with ambiguous optimizations and multiple MPTs and can use different calibration approaches. Nice work! #phylogeny
If you see this quote with flowers from your gallery.
We can all use some beauty right now (Quercus robur L., pedunculate oak, in Belgium; www.plantsystematics.org/imgs/jdelaet...)
We can all use some beauty right now (Quercus robur L., pedunculate oak, in Belgium; www.plantsystematics.org/imgs/jdelaet...)
January 28, 2025 at 12:55 PM
If you see this quote with flowers from your gallery.
We can all use some beauty right now (Quercus robur L., pedunculate oak, in Belgium; www.plantsystematics.org/imgs/jdelaet...)
We can all use some beauty right now (Quercus robur L., pedunculate oak, in Belgium; www.plantsystematics.org/imgs/jdelaet...)
Wheeler (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...) recently proposed to deal with inapplicable characters in #morphology and #phylogeny by concatenating morphological characters into morphological sequences that are, in a next step, to be analyzed using #phylogenetic tree alignment algorithms.
Much ado about nothing: inapplicable data as insertion–deletion events
The treatment of inapplicable characters has proved especially vexing to systematists. Investigators have wrestled with alternative coding scenarios to capture both the presence and absence of a feat....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
January 23, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Wheeler (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...) recently proposed to deal with inapplicable characters in #morphology and #phylogeny by concatenating morphological characters into morphological sequences that are, in a next step, to be analyzed using #phylogenetic tree alignment algorithms.
Reposted by Jan De Laet
Our new paper on the #phylogeny of Osmundales is out. We reviewed the phylogeny of the group by taking into account character dependence and found that most of the recognised groups are hardly when dependencies are ignored. Check it out
#ferns #fossilfriday
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
#ferns #fossilfriday
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
January 11, 2025 at 10:58 PM
Our new paper on the #phylogeny of Osmundales is out. We reviewed the phylogeny of the group by taking into account character dependence and found that most of the recognised groups are hardly when dependencies are ignored. Check it out
#ferns #fossilfriday
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
#ferns #fossilfriday
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...