Although phylogenetic analysis based on synapomorphies is said to comply better with the
hypothetico-deductive methodology advocated by Popper and other philosophers of science …

Previously presented arguments for and against character weighting in systematic analyses
are briefly reviewed and the bases for different weighting methods summarized. A priori and …

When the concept of homology is operationalized with synapomorphy and tested with
character congruence, homology and homoplasy are treated as a complement relation, a …

Harper (1976) and Nelson (Ms.) have pointed out that cladograms are equivalent not to
phylogenetic trees but to sets of such trees; thus, in Fig. 1 the two-taxon cladogram on the …

Three concepts of ancestry are distinguished, the individual organism as ancestor, the
population or species as ancestor, and the supraspecific taxon as ancestor. Of these, only …

When constructing a cladogram from a data set a researcher will, as a matter of course,
select the shortest possible branching diagram that will represent the data, thus minimizing …

With the realization that multiple equally parsimonious cladograms might exist for a given
data set (Mickevich, 1978), construction of classifications in such instances became a …

The notion that two characters evolve independently is of interest for two reasons. First,
theories of biological integration often predict that change in one character requires …

Cladistic analysis in the most general sense involves the testing of different hypotheses of
synapomorphy against one another to produce a hierarchical summary of the inferred …

The first factor in the phylogenetic program and the only one that is of an empirical nature is
phylogeny, but even phylogeny is not a brute fact to be discovered merely by looking and …