Tree Tuesday: The Affinities of Jaffa Cakes
Shown here is the phylogeny of biscuits (or maybe the cladogram of cookies). From the ground-breaking work of Smith (2005) The Affinities of Jaffa Cakes: Using Cladistics to Classify Biscuits. Note the controversial basal subgrouping of the pseudobiscuits clade.
Edit: I wasn’t particularly convinced by the treelike-ness of these biscuitoids, so I threw the data into a NeighborNet and was shocked and mildly nauseated to see the amount of conflicting signal there:
This usually indicates conflicting signal, in this case probably horizontal transfer (cross breeding) between the biscuits. In particular, the Partidae (Pinkwafer, Minigems and Partyring) appear to have a lot of traits in common with the Angulars sub-clade of the True Biscuits AND with Rounds. Yuck.
Posted on 
May 27th, 2008 by 
Simon Greenhill
One Response to “Tree Tuesday: The Affinities of Jaffa Cakes”
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Email Henry Updates to Me
May 29th, 2008 at 3:00 am
Hahahaha, you saved me from doing the same thing. Given that these are all British biscuits, I think really that we need to have the Antipodean bikky phyla represented, not to mention the North American Cookies! All I could think of was MMM TIMTAMS.