Farewell to Species - reticulation

Curtis Clark jcclark at CSUPOMONA.EDU
Tue Feb 1 08:22:24 CST 2000


At 04:27 PM 00.02.01 +0100, Pierre Deleporte wrote:
>For instance, is homoplasy due to
>hybridization differentiable from homoplasy due to other processes?

This is a common misconception. If a species or lineage of hybrid origin
has inherited features from both parents, those features are *homology*
("similarity due to common descent"), not homoplasy, no matter how they
disturb a branching cladogram. Any method other than concordance of
evidence that separates homology and homoplasy (and yes, I know that some
argue that there are no such methods) will separate homoplasy from the
homologies that hybrid lineages share with their parents.


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Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
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