Czerkas's assertion that the use
of cladistics is «one of the biggest mistakes ever made in paleontology» is laughable.
Although not a practitioner
himself of cladistic methods that were in the 1980s and 1990s transforming what we now know about dinosaur descent, he was sympathetic.
Towards a phylogeny of the Metazoa: evaluating alternative phylogenetic positions of Platyhelminthes, Nemertea, and Gnathostomulida, with a critical reappraisal
of cladistic characters.
Not exact matches
First, note that the «holistic» approach
of macroevolution implicitly incorporates the geologic time scales within the fossil record, allowing for comparison and contrast
of the relatively minor and major morphological divergence
of various forms (i.e. morphometric
cladistics).
For the past two decades, scientists using
cladistics have claimed that dromaeosaurs were nonavian ancestors
of birds, representing the best examples
of how ground - dwelling dinosaurs supposedly evolved into birds.
In the 1960s, the German entomologist Willi Hennig invented
cladistics, a method
of determining which branches go where on the tree
of life.
Other data have cast the whole Linnaean structure into doubt (which is why there is now a competing branch
of systematics, called
cladistics, that tries to chart relationships in a much more precise, if cumbersome, way).
Cladistic analysis
of eggshell characters: a phylogenic assessment
of prismatic dinosaur eggs from the Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation
of Montana.
While
cladistics, molecular sequencing and the fossil record all present different data sets, systematic biologists generally find similar patterns
of diversification in all three.
They depend heavily on
cladistics, a method
of hypothesizing relationships among organisms.
cladistic species concept: The concept
of species, according to which a species is a lineage
of populations between two phylogenetic branch points (or speciation events).
The members
of a group in a
cladistic classification share a more recent common ancestor with one another than with the members
of any other group.
Reviewed by Merritt Clifton Though you may never have heard
of either «taxonomy» or «
cladistics,» the two central concepts in Carol Kaesuk Yoon's 2009 opus Naming Nature, it remains a fascinating read for -LSB-...]
Cladistic analysis
of myxozoan species with known alternating life - cycles.
So, if you used something like
cladistics, you would avoid choosing feather color as a defining feature
of swans, and birds in general.