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DNA samples of live individuals.

It would be more of a mesh/graph than a tree but you get what I mean. I guess we could only have access to potential graphs with varying degrees of probability. In this case, what would be the figures like? What would be the probability of getting the nth level right? Also, we don't care about dead branches (eg. your childless great uncle)

To be honest I don't know if I'm posting this in the right StackExchange.

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    There is now a (beta) [biology.stackexchange.com](http://biology.stackexchange.com/); I recommend reposting the question there. Exactly how biologists would model genealogies with probability is more specific to their territory than ours.2012-03-13

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In more precise terms the question can be interpreted as: whether realistic probabilistic models of evolution are identifiable, and/or whether particular reconstruction procedures are statistically consistent. That is, can the model with all its parameters (such as the topology of the genealogical tree, the lengths of all the tree branches, or various rates of mutation) be inferred given unlimited amounts of observable data.

In any evolutionary process a lot of information is lost over time but it might still be possible to reconstruct some of the structure, such as the evolutionary tree but not the exact DNA profile of all the ancestors, from complete data on the living descendants. Whether a single tree can be consistently assigned to the set of DNA samples is dependent on the reconstruction procedure, and different procedures will arrive at different trees.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0041

http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2660

http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2124