cladistics
Noun
Meaning
a taxonomic system of classifying species based on the branching patterns of cladograms that are built to infer phylogenetic relations
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Examples
For the anthropologists Lieberman and Jackson (1995), however, there are more profound methodological and conceptual problems with using cladistics to support concepts of race.
These pre- cladistics analyses emphasised as shared features: multiciliated (with multiple cilia per cell), glandular epidermis; rod-shaped secretory bodies or rhabdites; frontal glands or organs; protonephridia ; and acoelomate body organization.
At the same time, cladistics rapidly became the dominant set of methods of phylogenetics in evolutionary biology, because computers made it possible to process large quantities of data about organisms and their characteristics.
Difference from cladistics Phenetic analyses do not distinguish between plesiomorphies - traits that are inherited from an ancestor (and therefore phylogenetically uninformative) - and apomorphies - traits that evolved anew in one or several lineages.
W. H. Freeman, San Francisco. xv + 573 p. Phenetics has largely been superseded by cladistics for research into evolutionary relationships among species.
The use of newer taxonomic tools such as cladistics and phylogenetic nomenclature has led to a different way of looking at evolution (expressed in many nested clades ) and this sometimes leads to a desire for more ranks.