Systematists, comparative biologists, taxonomists and evolutionary biologists all concern themselves with the evolutionary relationships between animals and plants. Homology is the principle underlying these disciplines. When looking at groups of organisms, shared positional similarities (homologues) provide the raw data from which hypotheses of common ancestry (homology) may be suggested. In order to explore the relationship between homologues (characters) and particular hypotheses of common ancestry, complex matrices are devised, where homologues are coded, allowing theories of homology to be developed and tested. Practically nothing has been written about this matrix-building process and yet it is of fundamental importance to our understanding of diversity and evolutionary history. This book fills the gap by discussing the different ways observations are coded and the consequences for the resulting hypotheses. It takes a pragmatic approach and uses case studies as well as theoretical examples to offer practical solutions.
List of contributors vi Preface vii Introduction 1(9) R. Toby Pennington Homology and the inference of systematic relationships: some historical and philosophical perspectives 10(12) Andrew V.Z. Brower A survey of primary homology assessment: different botanists perceive and define characters in different ways 22(32) Julie A. Hawkins Experiments in coding multistate characters 54(27) Peter L. Forey Ian J. Kitching On characters and character states: do overlapping and non-overlapping variation, morphology and molecules all yield data of the same value? 81(25) Peter F. Stevens Heuristic reconstruction of hypothetical--ancestral DNA sequences: sequence alignment vs direct optimization 106(8) Ward Wheeler `Cryptic characters in monocotyledons: homology and coding 114(10) Paula J. Rudall Process morphology from a cladistic perspective 124(21) Peter H. Weston Homology, coding and three-taxon statement analysis 145(38) Robert Scotland Characters, homology and three-item analysis 183(26) David M. Williams Darrell J. Siebert Index 209(5) Systematics Association Publications 214
Robert Scotland, R. Toby Pennington
Biežāk uzdotie jautājumi par e-grāmatām