[Taxacom] Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?

Sat Feb 10 13:41:05 CST 2018

The issue of the common ancestor of Bill and his Dad is not informative
unless it is posed as a three taxon statement (with respect to a fourth
outgroup). My limited familiarity with cladistics is with differentiated
entities, not within populations of individual organisms so perhaps someone
else could comment. Perhaps if the question were whether Bill is more
closely related to Dad than Mom (or Mum) the answer would be a trichotomy
(technically unresolved cladogram).

John Grehan

On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 2:19 PM, Richard Zander <Richard.Zander at mobot.org>
wrote:

> I don’t think so.
>
>
>
> Take Billy and his Dad. Who is the common ancestor?
>
>
>
> Consider Billy, Dad and Granddad. Which two are more closely related to
> each other than to the third? Using cladistics you can probably get a
> resolved cladogram in this very simplistic puzzle of progenitor-descendant
> relationship.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Richard H. Zander
>
> Missouri Botanical Garden – 4344 Shaw Blvd. – St. Louis – Missouri –
> 63110 – USA
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=4344+Shaw+Blvd.+%E2%80%93+St.+Louis+%E2%80%93+Missouri+%E2%80%93+63110+%E2%80%93+USA&entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> richard.zander at mobot.org
>
> Web sites: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/bfna/bfnamenu.htm and
> http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/
>
>
>
> *From:* John Grehan [mailto:calabar.john at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Saturday, February 10, 2018 1:02 PM
> *To:* Richard Zander
> *Cc:* Kenneth Kinman; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>
> *Subject:* Re: [Taxacom] Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?
>
>
>
> However one might want to call it and however one might want to represent
> it, the primary issue behind all evolutionary relationships from the
> beginning until now has been whether A is more closely related to B than C.
> Cladistics is one way of doing that (and within cladistics many ways to
> determine how). That is not to say that there may be others just as good.
>
>
>
> John Grehan
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 1:54 PM, Richard Zander <Richard.Zander at mobot.org>
> wrote:
>
> Ken:
> Hörandl and Stuessy are trying to find common ground with cladists. They
> aver that discovering shared descent is a primary desideratum. My stance
> regarding shared ancestors is that this is not particularly important, but
> progenitor-descendant relationships are, simply because the latter can be
> identified, often anyway, while modeling shared descent between sister
> groups involves unnamed, invisible, hypothetical progenitors of sister
> groups, and is primarily a clumsy attempt to add an evolutionary dimension
> to a cluster analysis dichotomous tree.  Shared descent of a lineage is a
> fine concept, but a lineage should not be a branching series of nodes, one
> node generating the next, but instead a sometimes-branching series of taxa.
>
> Richard
>
>
> -------
> Richard H. Zander
> Missouri Botanical Garden - 4344 Shaw Blvd. - St. Louis - Missouri -
> 63110 - USA
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=4344+Shaw+Blvd.+-+St.+Louis+-+Missouri+-+63110+-+USA&entry=gmail&source=g>
> richard.zander at mobot.org<mailto:richard.zander at mobot.org>
> Web sites: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/bfna/bfnamenu.htm and
> http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/
>
> From: Kenneth Kinman [mailto:kinman at hotmail.com]
> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2018 5:05 PM
> To: Richard Zander; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?
>
>
> Hi Richard,
>
>       Do you have any opinion on Horandl and Stuessy's 2010 paper in the
> journal Taxon ( "Paraphyletic groups as natural units of biological
> classification" ).
>
>       For anyone who has not read it, it can be found it here:
>
>
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elvira_Hoerandl/
> publication/230818733_Paraphyletic_groups_as_natural_units_of_biological_
> classification/links/0912f504f1250eb15b000000/Paraphyletic-groups-as-
> natural-units-of-biological-classification.pdf
>
> ________________________________
> From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom-bounces@
> mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> on behalf of Richard Zander <Richard.Zander at mobot.org
> <mailto:Richard.Zander at mobot.org>>
> Sent: Friday, February 9, 2018 4:45 PM
> To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?
>
> Paraphyly is not a process in nature. It models nothing real. It is a
> gimmick used by cladists because there is no innate taxon concept in
> cladistics.  It occurs when one taxon generates one or more other taxa of
> the same taxonomic level.
>
>
>
> Phylogenetics is not the study of evolution. It is the study of
> dichotomous trees generated by non-ultrametric cluster analysis using
> character state changes. Cladistics is better at grouping evolutionarily
> related taxa than cluster analysis by overall similarity, but it does not
> model an evolutionary tree.
>
>
>
> To study evolutionary trees you need to be aware of (have information
> about) radiation of descendants from progenitors. Trees restricted to
> sister groups do not allow hypotheses of serial evolution.
>
>
>
> This discussion is about classification based on a particular kind of
> cluster analysis, not evolution. Classification should reflect what we know
> about evolution, not cluster analysis.
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Richard H. Zander
>
> Missouri Botanical Garden - 4344 Shaw Blvd. - St. Louis - Missouri -
> 63110 - USA
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=4344+Shaw+Blvd.+-+St.+Louis+-+Missouri+-+63110+-+USA&entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> richard.zander at mobot.org<mailto:richard.zander at mobot.org>
>
> Web sites: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/bfna/bfnamenu.htm and
> http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/
> bfnamenu - Missouri Botanical Garden<http://www.mobot.org/
> plantscience/bfna/bfnamenu.htm>
> www.mobot.org<http://www.mobot.org>
> B ryophyte F lora of N orth A merica. W EB S ITE . MENU * The Treatments:
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