Cladistics

Introduction

Cladistics is a method of reconstructing phylogeny without necessary recourse to either fossils or molecular distances. It is required to trace the evolutionary changes within a group of organisms (a series of taxa), and the following stages are followed.

Discussion

In Characters 2 and 4, Human is different from the outgroup, but uniquely so: The states are autapomorph (uniquely derived). These two characters therefore show how unusual human is, but not which of the other two ingroup members it more resembles. But if we take Characters 1, 5, and 6, we see that though human is again different from the outgroup, it shares ...