revolution

[Richard Jensen]

I have to admit that if one substituted the word Phenetics for the phrase
"Cladistic parsimony" below, then one does have a description of
phenetics.  There is a tendency to forget that both phenetic and
cladistics analyses start at the same points, generate the same kinds of
data, and may be analyzed by a variety of procedures.  They both can
claim objectivity, but they both have a large measure of inherent
subjectivity - involving algorithmic options.  One way that they do
differ, and this is a key difference, is that cladistics generally adds a
layer between character description and analysis - hypothesized
transformation series.

Richard J. Jensen      |   E-MAIL: rjensen at saintmarys.edu
Dept. of Biology       |   TELEPHONE: 219-284-4674
Saint Mary's College   |   FAX: 219-284-4716
Notre Dame, IN  46556  |

On Wed, 2 Oct 1996, Tom DiBenedetto wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Oct 1996 18:22:50 -0400, Mark Garland wrote:
>
> >In a message dated 96-10-02 12:22:23 EDT, tdib at UMICH.EDU (Tom DiBenedetto)
> >writes:
> >
> ><<   [[ Cladistic parsimony ]] ... approaches do not use
> > a particular model of evolutionary processes, but rather incorporate
> > relevant knowledge at a prior stage, at the level of formulating
> > hypotheses of homology. The algorithm is left to function as an
> > objective pattern-extractor from a data-set of characters which have
> > already been accepted as homologous. >>
> >
> >Sounds like phenetics to me.
>
> not to me.
>
> ---------------------------------------------
> Tom DiBenedetto
> Fish Division
> Museum of Zoology
> University of Michigan
>