genetic vs morphological trace of phylogeny

[Curtis Clark]

At 08:23 2004-04-14, John Grehan wrote:
>Perhaps this could be clarified for me as it seems to agree with my view
>that genetic similarity is not necessarily a measure of phylogenetic
>relationship ["sister lineages may be genetically "less similar" than one
>or the other is to the outgroup

It's why distance measures don't always work. Modern DNA phylogenetic
studies don't use distance measures. "Genetic similarity" is basically too
crude a measure, and it's not what we are talking about here.

>A cladogram with 100 steps can be less homoplastic than
>one with 99 steps.

Cladograms are neither homoplastic nor homologous. The terms refer to the
nature of similarity, and so apply to character states.

Quoting off-list email on-list without permission of the sender is
generally regarded to be in very bad taste, and in the United States is
technically a violation of copyright law (although effectively
unprosecutable). It seems you are in a minority in this case as well. :-)


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