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Related Experiment Videos

Character analysis in morphological phylogenetics: problems and solutions.

J J Wiens1

  • 1Section of Amphibians and Reptiles, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213-4080, USA. wiensj@carnegiemuseums.org

Systematic Biology
|July 16, 2002
PubMed
Summary
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This study proposes coding morphological characters as continuous quantitative traits to address issues in phylogenetic analysis. This new method, applied to hoplocercid lizards, reveals significant phylogenetic structure in quantitative data.

Area of Science:

  • Systematics
  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Phylogenetics

Background:

  • Morphological phylogenetics faces theoretical controversies and practical inconsistencies in empirical studies.
  • Most morphological variation is fundamentally quantitative, irrespective of qualitative or quantitative coding by systematists.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose a unified solution for defining, delimiting, and ordering morphological character states.
  • To introduce a novel parsimony method for analyzing quantitative traits as continuous variables in phylogenetic reconstruction.

Main Methods:

  • Coding morphological characters as continuous quantitative traits.
  • Implementing a new parsimony method: step-matrix gap-weighting, a modification of Thiele's approach.
  • Reviewing and describing three solutions for scaling or weighting quantitative characters.

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Main Results:

  • Application of the new coding method to hoplocercid lizard data.
  • Demonstrated sensitivity of phylogenetic conclusions to different scaling methods.
  • Quantitative data, when coded using the new approach, exhibit significant phylogenetic structure and comparable homoplasy to qualitative data.

Conclusions:

  • Coding morphological characters as continuous quantitative traits offers a potential solution to fundamental problems in character analysis.
  • The proposed method successfully analyzes quantitative data, revealing phylogenetic structure and homoplasy.
  • Despite some objections, continuous quantitative characters can contain significant phylogenetic information.