The frequent recovery of polytomies (multifurcating rather than bifurcating relationships) in phylogenetic analyses has prompted interest in the biological nature of these inferred polytomies. Polytomies may reflect the inability to resolve bifurcating relationships (“soft” polytomies) or they may represent multiple simultaneous speciation events (“hard” polytomies; see Hoelzer and Melnick 1994 for additional discussion). Walsh et al. (1999) recently suggested that power analysis might provide an excellent framework for examining the nature of polytomies. We found this approach to be an innovative an interesting way to examine the question, but we also proposed a more direct way to examine the power of phylogenetic analyses to examine the null hypothesis of a polytomy in this brief communication. Walsh and Friesen (2001) agreed that our general approach was sound, but pointed out that the worked example in our comment required a larger power (had reduced type II error) than those typically used by convention.