But my devotion to Middle-earth pales before that of Emil Johansson, a photographer and chemical engineering student from Sweden, who has read "every book there is to read about Middle-earth" and who has spent years compiling a family tree of every character – every character!
Towards the end I found myself drawing a family tree of the characters in an attempt to get the convoluted relationships straight in my head.
I was initially concerned that it was going to be one of those novels where you wish there were a "family tree" cast of characters at the beginning to refer back to.
Martin's forest-dense family trees of characters – knights in dented armour, damsels in bodice-bursting distress,and a nest of dragons imported from fairy tales – could not have been an easy sell.
As Roquentin sits in a park, the root of a tree loses its character of familiarity until he is overcome by nausea at its utterly alien character, its being en soi.
As always, she began by drawing a chart, a kind of family tree of the characters, listing their birth dates and other important events.
Parsimony ancestral state reconstruction, which minimizes the amount of character change given a tree topology and character state distribution, has been widely utilised but may over-represent confidence in ancestral character states [ 53].
Most substitution models assume the independence of the different branches of a tree to compute the joint probability of the characters in C n. Therefore, they use the probabilities for substitutions among the character states in C along the edges of the tree T. We now establish a probabilistic link between Σ T and C n.
When either protein-coding or CR characters were traced on to the phylogenetic tree, only a small number of characters showed evidence of homoplasy, reflected by the high consistency (Kluge and Farris 1969) and retention indices (Farris 1989) when either partition was mapped on to the protein-coding tree (fig. 1).
Only 16 (~6%) individual trees exhibited intermediate morphologies or a combination of characters of different species.
[ 4] Strategies for resolving homoplasy as revealed by incompatible characters could be divided into two basic categories: a) adaptation of a tree to the full scope of the data, so that the apparent homoplasy on the tree is minimal, and b) recognition of incompatible characters and their exclusion from the phylogenetic analysis [ 7].
