Since the exact evolutionary pathways of extant organisms are usually unknown,
it is not suitable to use real data for examining the efficiency of a tree-making method.
Therefore, we employed a computer simulation, comparing reconstructed trees with
their model trees. In this study we compared the efficiency of the NJ method with
that of five other methods: UPGMA (Sokal and Sneath 1963), the DW method, the
ST method, Li’s (LI; 198 1) method, and the MF method. The LI method is a transformed
distance method (see Nei [ 1987, pp. 302-3051 for the explanation of the transformed
distance method), and the MF method is a modification of Farris’s (1972)
method. All these methods produce a unique parsimonious tree from distance data.
We considered both cases of constant and varying (expected) rates of nucleotide substitution.