What is "cladists"

Usage examples of "cladists".

These are the cladists, who follow the principles laid down in Willi Hennig's famous book Phylogenetic Systematics.

The reason they do so is one of history: they started out as true cladists, and kept some of the methods of cladists while abandoning their fundamental philosophy and rationale.

I suppose I have no choice but to call them transformed cladists, although I do so with reluctance.

In their underlying philosophy, so-called transformed cladists have more in common with the other school of pure-pattern measurers, the ones often called 'pheneticists' or 'numerical taxonomists', whom I have just discussed under the title of average-distance measurers.

Like average-distance measurers, transformed cladists are not out to discover family trees.

But unlike the distance measurers, who, at least in theory, are prepared to let Nature tell them whether she is actually hierarchically organized, the transformed cladists assume that she is.

The transformed cladists, however, like the true cladists that they once were, bring in clustery, branchy thinking right at the outset.

Like true cladists, they would begin, at least in principle, by writing down all possible bifurcating trees, and then choosing the best.

Not content with a perfectly sensible belief that there is something to be said for leaving evolutionary and ancestral assumptions out of the practice of taxonomy, a belief that they share with pheneticist 'distance measurers', some transformed cladists have gone right over the top and concluded that there must be something wrong with evolution itself!

To the obvious objection that something can't be older than its ancestor, the cladists respond that the ancestral forms must have existed sooner than the traces that have been found so far, thus reintroducing the incompleteness-of-the-fossil-record argument but on a scale never suggested even in Darwin's day.