When you set up and then monitor phylogenetic analyses, do you feel as if you are gardening? You plant the seed with hope. Sometimes you move it to another patch. Sometimes you have to pull out a weed. And then you wait for the harvest. I call it the Garden of Analyses.
And, like real gardening, you don’t so much come to *the* final result, but simply run out of time for the moment. (See Maddison’s Law of Phylogenetic Analysis: subulatepalpomere.com/category/phy...)
Posts about Phylogenetics written by David Maddison
For me it's more like trying to find your favorite chocolate filling in a chocolate assortment box. You can only test by biting each, which takes time. You can use a heuristic to try to bias your picks for the best ones, but it might not work. And there are more chocolates than atoms in the universe