0–1 Laws for Pattern Occurrences in Phylogenetic Trees and Networks

Abstract

In a recent paper, the question of determining the fraction of binary trees that contain a fixed pattern known as the snowflake was posed. We show that this fraction goes to 1, providing two very different proofs: a purely combinatorial one that is quantitative and specific to this problem; and a proof using branching process techniques that is less explicit, but also much more general, as it applies to any fixed patterns and can be extended to other trees and networks. In particular, it follows immediately from our second proof that the fraction of d-ary trees (resp. level-k networks) that contain a fixed d-ary tree (resp. level-k network) tends to 1 as the number of leaves grows.