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Ciadistics in taxonomic botany – master or servant?
Author(s) -
Hedberg Olov
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
taxon
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.819
H-Index - 81
eISSN - 1996-8175
pISSN - 0040-0262
DOI - 10.2307/1222672
Subject(s) - cladistics , taxon , systematics , taxonomy (biology) , biology , biological classification , evolutionary biology , ecology , phylogenetics , biochemistry , gene
Summary Hedberg, O.: Ciadistics in taxonomic botany – master or servant? – Taxon 44: 3‐11. 1995. – ISSN 0040‐0262. Cladistics, a nowadays often computerized methodology for taxonomic research, is claimed by its proponents to be more advanced and less subjective than traditional evolutionary systematics. It offers a convenient method of combining factual character state distribution with assumptions on directions of evolutionary change, and of constructing hypothetic evolutionary trees. But its usefulness in taxonomic botany is hampered by difficulties in outgroup selection, frequency of parallelisms and reversals, and wide variation within taxa. Prudently used, cladistics may certainly be a useful tool to botanical taxonomists, but if pursued as an independent computer game it may be harmful to taxonomy and to biology as a whole.