http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=299231


in reply to Re: Re: A Beginning Guide To Evolutionary Algorithms
in thread A Beginning Guide To Evolutionary Algorithms

In fact, one major problem in evolutionary biology and phylogenetics is the near-impossibility of defining the distance between two different phylogenetic trees mathematically. For instance, you may wish to have some quantitative metric to indicate how much a tree is perturbed by the addition/removal of an additional element, but as best as I know that's virtually impossible.