Mr. Men - Part II

As expected, today's highlight was our "Research Methods" practical (though we did get the exciting announcement this morning that "History of the Biosphere" is cancelled for a week, as Mike will be out of town). Just as Simon had told us yesterday, our goal was to create a cladogram - a "family tree" - for Mr. Men, those lovable British children's book characters. A cladogram is created using a program called PAUP, and the process is remarkably (and deceptively) simple. Basically, you choose several different characters you want to compare and give a numerical value (usually 0 and 1) to the different states of that character. Then, you plot your characters versus your taxa - groups of organisms - on a matrix, plug it into PAUP, and in the end you wind up with a cladogram. I chose 16 such characters (such as head shape and the presence of a nose) for mine. I didn't want to bias my choice of taxa, so I opted to choose only those Mr. Men that were labeled with a prime number on the overhead at the front of the room. This left me, conveniently, with 16 taxa to look at (Quick, math whizzes - you know who you are - if I tell you that my last Mr. Man was also the last on the main list, how many Mr. Men are there?).
Now, enough of the process; I'm sure you all want to hear the results, unless of course you've already looked at the diagram. There were four fairly primitive Mr. Men: Mr. Daydream, Mr. Greedy, Mr. Happy, and Mr. Tall. The exact relationship between them was impossible to work out with the data at hand, though. The main group of Mr. Men (the eumistermanimorphs, if you will) comprised two groups. The first contained only Mr. Tickle and Mr. Muddle. The other group is far and away the most diverse, and it happens to be the one into which my own Mr. Man falls. Interestingly, the relationship between Mr. John and other taxa is a bit muddy. While the exact phylogeny is not clear, it does appear that my nearest relatives are (drumroll) Messrs. Clever and Uppity. I figure that's a pedigree I can be proud of!
I do have two bits of non-Mr. Man news from today. Just before starting our practical, several of us were awarded research project topics, and I got the one I've been holding out for! I could try and explain it completely, but the departmental web site will do a far better job than I could. Just scroll down to #22 and you'll see what precisely it is I will be spending the next several months doing. We also received our first grades today, for our ichnology papers (anyone who reads this journal often will remember it; it's the one I complained so bitterly about). Suffice it to say, the ending to this particular story is a happy one, and while there's always room for improvement, I can rest easier now knowing that I'm on the right page. Now to apply that to my bird paper, my statistics write-ups, my Ice Age presentation,...