HENRY

R (yes, the letter) is a seriously powerful statistics programming language. A recently announced project, R-Phylo has been started to help people use R for phylogenetic work:

All organisms are linked together by the tree of life. We can use this tree along with trait data, to understand many aspects of biology: does specialization lead to increased speciation? do body size and brain size coevolve? how have genome sizes changed over time? and more. R has many functions to address such questions. This website has tutorials on how to do these analyses in R and an overview of what is available in R. There is also a mailing list for asking questions about using and developing comparative methods in R

There’s already been some interest in R and phylogenetics already (e.g. APE and a book), so it’s great to see that continuing. There’s a short list of tutorials/how-to guides already up on the site, and they look good so far. (via).

Posted on March 18th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill