Homology and Systematics

Coding Characters for Phylogenetic Analysis

Robert Scotland, R. Toby Pennington

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040215548
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

When looking at groups of organisms, shared characteristics (homologues) provide the raw data from which hypotheses of common ancestry may be suggested. In order to explore the relationship between homologues and particular hypotheses of common ancestry, complex matrices are devised, where homologues are coded, allowing theories of homology to be developed and tested. Practically nothing has been written about this matrix-building process, which is fundamental to our understanding of diversity and evolutionary history. This book fills the gap by discussing the ways observations are coded and the consequences for resulting hypotheses using case studies and theoretical examples.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Homology and the Inference of systematic relationships: some historical and philosophical perspectives
• Chapter 2 A survey of primary homology assessment: different botanists perceive and define characters in different ways
• Chapter 3 Experiments in coding multistate characters
• Chapter 4 On characters and character states: do overlapping and non-overlapping variation, morphology and molecules all yield data of the same value?
• Chapter 5 Heuristic reconstruction of hypothetical-ancestral DNA sequences: sequence alignment vs direct optimization
• Chapter 6 ‘Cryptic® characters In monocotyledons: homology and coding
• Chapter 7 Process morphology from a cladistic perspective
• Chapter 8 Homology, coding and three-taxon statement analysis
• Chapter 9 Characters, homology and three-item analysis
• Index