Rapid insect radiations are difficult phylogenetic problems not simply because internal branches are short, but because several biological and analytical processes can produce the same visible symptom: discordant gene trees. This phylogenetic framework argues that a recurrent error occurs when an estimated gene tree is read directly as a species history. The framework separates four inferential objects—observed molecular characters, gene-copy genealogies, estimated gene trees, and species-history hypotheses—and classifies discordance by where it enters that chain. Incomplete lineage sorting and introgression are treated as biological generators of discordance; sampling, orthology, paralogy, sequence fragmentation, and upstream processing can distort the evidence supplied to tree estimation; and model misspecification can turn uncertainty into directional error. The framework therefore treats discordance as a diagnostic problem requiring competing explanations rather than as a label with a unique cause. Its principal contribution is a proposed error-source architecture for rapid insect radiations that preserves uncertainty, taxonomic boundaries, and the distinction between phylogenetic support and historical truth. It is intended as an interpretive framework, not a validated classifier of error causes.
