A simple parsimony-based approach to assess ancestor-descendant relationships
One of the main goals of systematics is to reconstruct the tree of life. Half a century ago, the breakthrough of cladistics was a major step towards this objective because it allowed us to assess relatedness patterns among species, an abstract kind of relationship. Unfortunately, the philosophy of...
Збережено в:
| Дата: | 2017 |
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| Автор: | |
| Формат: | Стаття |
| Мова: | English |
| Опубліковано: |
Інститут ботаніки ім. М.Г. Холодного НАН України
2017
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| Назва видання: | Український ботанічний журнал |
| Теми: | |
| Онлайн доступ: | http://dspace.nbuv.gov.ua/handle/123456789/178494 |
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| Назва журналу: | Digital Library of Periodicals of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine |
| Цитувати: | A simple parsimony-based approach to assess ancestor-descendant relationships / D. Aubert // Український ботанічний журнал. — 2017. — Т. 74, № 2. — С. 103-121. — Бібліогр.: 52 назв. — англ. |
Репозитарії
Digital Library of Periodicals of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine| Резюме: | One of the main goals of systematics is to reconstruct the tree of life. Half a century ago, the breakthrough of cladistics
was a major step towards this objective because it allowed us to assess relatedness patterns among species, an abstract kind
of relationship. Unfortunately, the philosophy of cladism forbade to go further and to seek more realistic relationships, like
the ancestor-descendant relationship, which is the expected fundamental kind of relationship of the tree of life according
to Darwinian evolution. Here, I describe a simple parsimony-based procedure which can be used to transform a classical
cladogram into a genuine phylogenetic tree, i.e. a caulogram. It consists in deleting as many unobserved and unnamed nodes as
possible and replacing them with observed and named species. A new Bayesian non-stochastic weighting scheme is used to assess
character reliability for both this procedure and classical cladogram construction. I illustrate the whole process by assessing the
relationships between the species of the moss genus Didymodon sensu lato (Pottiaceae) and discuss the resulting caulogram by
confronting it with the previous methodology from the evolutionary literature. I finally argue that strictly adhering to cladist
epistemology is untenable and that we must seek new formal methods to find ancestral species as well as ancestral higher taxa. |
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