Characters.

[Richard Jensen]

John Grehan wrote:

> At 08:42 PM 6/18/04 +0200, pierre deleporte wrote:
> >OK you restate your view, but it is simply wrong as cladistics goes. If we
> >have surmounted the semantic problem about "phenetic" (concerns analysis,
> >not characters) and we do agree on what "overall similarity" means (i.e.
> >between taxa, not characters), hence your statement is still wrong.
>
> We will just have to agree to disagree. I view phenetic characters as
> characters that individually represent overall similarity of a feature. To
> me that's phenetic.

Here, perhaps, is a major part of the problem.  Overall similarity is not a
function of a single character - I don't know how a single character can
illustrate overall similarity.  Overall similarity refers to a measure of
similarity (e.g., a simple matching coefficient, Manhattan distance, Pearson
correlation) between all pair-wise comparisons of taxa (e.g., A vs. B; A vs. C;
B vs. C) "over all characters in the data matrix."

This is why definitions are important!

Dick
--
Richard J. Jensen              | tel: 574-284-4674
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