Cocktail phylogeny

by Lisa on June 24, 2010 in General Geekery, Uncategorized

A kind soul posted a link to this on the vertebrate paleontology listserv.  This is an impressive feat of procrastination. I remember spending more than one lunch hour in the grad lounge arguing what the phylogenetic tree of pie should look like.

Initial comments that come to mind:

1) I was going to ask where the bootstrap values were, but saw that branches with little support had been collapsed into polytomies. Nice.

2) I spy at least one paraphyletic group, though I admit I did not try to rotate around nodes, nor reroot the tree.

3) The original post of this that gives the exact methodology  says that the tree was rooted at vodka because “so many drinks contain vodka”. What, no outgroup analysis?

Post your comments and suggestions for future work / outgroups below!

Post Author

This post was written by Lisa who has written 30 posts on Geekaroni.

2 Responses “Cocktail phylogeny”

  1. dave-o July 6, 2010 12:24 pm #

    Agreed on the outgroup analysis. Especially around rum. Really.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. The Phylogeny of Cocktails « - July 20, 2010

    [...] This chart was generated by taking a list of cocktail drinks, representing each ingredient as a different gene, and then using a computer to generate a phylogenetic tree. Over Christmas 2008 I was thinking about how a lot of drink recipes have similar ingredients, and probably developed when someone modified an existing recipe. Take, for example, a Tom Collins and a John Collins, which are identical except that the John Collins uses bourbon instead of gin. I wondered if it was possible to reconstruct the phylogeny of the drinks. It turns out this is easier than one would think. The PHYLIP computer program can create family trees based on presence or absence of a trait (0 or 1), and it doesn’t matter what you consider a “trait”. I collected about 90 recipes and used PHYLIP’s pars utility, with default options, to group them into families based on their 512 unique ingredients. The tree was generated with PHYLIP’s drawgram utility and cleaned up in Inkscape. The tree should technically be unrooted, but I rooted it on vodka since so many of the drinks contain vodka. The cool thing about grouping the drinks this way is that they form families with similar ingredients. So if you like martinis, you can look in the “gin family” to find other drinks that will taste similar. Some of the comments I’ve received: “An impressive feat of procrastination” [...]