statistical method is preferable to none at all. Additionally, it is not clear what would be meant if the statement "evolution is parsimonious" were in fact true. This could be taken to mean that more character changes may have occurred historically than are predicted using the parsimony criterion. Because parsimony phylogeny estimation reconstructs the minimum number of changes necessary to explain a tree, this is quite possible. However, it has been shown through simulation studies, testing with known in vitro viral phylogenies, and congruence with other methods, that the accuracy of parsimony is in most cases not compromised by this. Parsimony analysis uses the number of character changes on trees to choose the best tree, but it does not require that exactly that many changes, and no more, produced the tree. As long as the changes that have not been accounted for are randomly distributed over the tree (a reasonable null expectation), the result should not be biased. In practice, the technique is robust: maximum parsimony exhibits minimal bias as a result of choosing the tree with the fewest changes. An analogy can be drawn with choosing among contractors based on their initial (nonbinding) estimate of the cost of a job. The actual finished cost is very likely to be higher than the estimate. Despite this, choosing the contractor who furnished the lowest estimate should theoretically result in the lowest final project cost. This is because, in the absence of other data, we would assume that all of the relevant contractors have the same risk of cost overruns. In practice, of course, unscrupulous business practices may bias this result; in phylogenetics, too, some particular phylogenetic problems (for example, long branch attraction, described above) may potentially bias results. In both cases, however, there is no way to tell if the result is going to be biased, or the degree to which it will be biased, based on the estimate itself. With parsimony too, there is no way to tell that the data are positively misleading, without comparison to other evidence. Parsimony is often characterized as implicitly adopting the position that evolutionary change is rare, or that homoplasy (convergence and reversal) is minimal in evolution. This is not entirely true: parsimony minimizes the number of convergences and reversals that are assumed by the preferred tree, but this may result in a relatively large number of such homoplastic events. It would be more