Quote: Eileen Whitehead Erlanson defining taxonomic inflation
I was reading today to find the origin of the term “taxonomic inflation”. This is a common idea today from people who criticize an overzealous attention to d...
All posts tagged with systematics
Quote: Darwin on the tree of life
Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, introduced the idea that the relationships between organisms form a tree.
Are parsimony analyses better than Bayesian methods for phylogenetics?
During the past few years, Bayesian approaches to phylogeny reconstruction have become more and more widespread, including analyses of fossil hominins. Among...
McKenna and Bell on ranked categories
I learned mammalian systematics and cladistics around the same time that Malcolm McKenna and Susan Bell published their 1997 book, Classification of Mammals:...
Link: The problem with ‘basal’ in phylogenetic trees
Stacey Smith summarizes the problems with using the term “basal” when discussing phylogenetic positions of organisms: “The ancestors are not among us”.