[Taxacom] Sampling/ Pseudoreplication in Morphometric Taxonomy

[Thomas Murphy]

I'm wondering if anyone has any literature recommendations pertaining to
sampling methods in morphometrics studies (to delineate species). I realize
sampling more than one individual from a population meets the criteria for
pseudoreplication. Should we be overly concerned with pseudoreplication in
multivariate analyses if our ultimate goal is capture variation that
(hopefully) resembles biological reality? Wouldn't a taxonomic treatment
based on morphometric data benefit from within and between population
variation.

Those who sample more than a single individual of a population, in
my opinion, have to options:
1) Average all measurements between individuals (subsampling), treating the
averaged values as a single sample.
2) Treat all individuals, within and between, as different samples.

The problem I see with option #1 is that the averaged values do not
represent a  single individual and therefore could be misleading. The
problem with option #2 seems to be the pseudoreplication argument (as
outlined above). Of course, the other option is to just measure a single
"representative" individual from a population- does this capture the
necessary morphological variation for a diagnosis?

I have seen all of these applied to morphometric methods of taxonomic
research. I'd be interested in what anyone thinks about this issue, as I
have not been able to locate literature that directly addresses this in
systematics.

Thanks,

Thomas Murphy