When Science meets Drinking

by Ethan on January 12th, 2009

Man, this made me happy. Spagghetilogic got bored over the holidays, and fed a bunch of cocktail recipes into PLYLIP to get a genuine phylogenetic tree, treating each ingredient as a gene or marker. What’s interesting is that there are a couple of cases of convergent evolution, mimicry, and so forth.

To wit:

Note that you can make out several different “kingdoms” of drinks after a close look at the tree. I can make out the Gin kingdom, the Orange Juice kingdom, and the Amaretto kingdom, for starters. Then we have the outliers, like a 110 in the Shade, which nobody in his right mind would drink. These are the platypuses and slime molds of the drink world.

Makes me wan to mix up a bunch of these to study their, err, gross morphology.