General relationships of mammalian orders and evolutionary development of primates inferred from best-fit α-globin phylogenies.

A best-fit α-globin phylogeny was identified by means of a global minimization approach from among the topologies generated by a parsimony strategy. Zip parsimony method was used to derive a set of near-parsimonious trees. For each of these topologies, a difference matrix was computed; and the topology with the best goodness of fit with the original matrix was retained as the best tree. Based on this phylogenetic scheme interrelationships among eutherian orders and the evolutionary development of primates has been discussed.