 Felsenstein (1978) was (and remains) an immensely impactful paper, generating numerous research programs. It is a largely theoretical and abstract paper that considers how different methods perform under different biological conditions. One natural question that might be posed concerns how prevalent these conditions are in the actual systems being studied. This is an empirical question, of course, and can be studied as such, though disputes over how to interpret empirical cases have proven controversial (Huelsenbeck 1997; Whiting 1998; Siddall &amp; Whiting 1999; Yang &amp; Rannala 2012).