Previous work (Penny and Hendy 1985, 1986) has shown that evolutionary trees reconstructed from sequence data converge to a consistent answer as longer sequences become available. The rate of convergence can be used to test hypotheses concerning both the results and methods. However, conditions are known where convergence to an incorrect tree can occur (Felsenstein 1978; Lake 1986). Maximum likelihood calculations have a theoretical advantage (Felsenstein 1982), but there has been no simple method for their calculation and a priori assumptions about the rates of evolution were required.
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Penny et al. (1987) studied this question.