means to compare support for strongly-supported branches. However, interpretation of decay values is not straightforward, and they seem to be preferred by authors with philosophical objections to the bootstrap (although many morphological systematists, especially paleontologists, report both). Double-decay analysis is a decay counterpart to reduced consensus that evaluates the decay index for all possible subtree relationships (n-taxon statements) within a tree. Problems with maximum parsimony phylogenetic inference Maximum parsimony is an epistemologically straightforward approach that makes few mechanistic assumptions, and is popular for this reason. However, it may not be statistically consistent under certain circumstances. Consistency, here meaning the monotonic convergence on the correct answer with the addition of more data, is a desirable property of statistical methods. As demonstrated in 1978 by Joe Felsenstein, maximum parsimony can be inconsistent under certain conditions. The category of situations in which this is known to occur is called long branch attraction, and occurs, for example, where there are long branches (a high level of substitutions) for two characters (A & C), but short branches for another two (B & D). A and B diverged from a common ancestor, as did C and D. Of course, to know that a method is giving you the wrong answer, you would need to know what the correct answer is. This is generally not the case in science. For this reason, some view statistical consistency as irrelevant to empirical phylogenetic questions. Assume for simplicity that we are considering a single binary character (it can either be + or -). Because the distance from B to D is small, in the vast majority of all cases, B and D will be the same. Here, we will assume that they are both + (+ and - are assigned arbitrarily and swapping them is only a matter of definition). If this is the case, there are four remaining possibilities. A and C can both be +, in which case all taxa are the same and all the trees have the same length. A can be + and C can be -, in which case only one character is different, and we cannot learn anything, as all trees have the same length. Similarly, A can be - and C can be +. The only remaining possibility is that A and C are both -. In this case, however, the evidence suggests that A and C group together, and B and