Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-10T20:42:15.577Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Modern phylogenetics in paleontology: comments on Vermeij 1999

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2016

Christopher A. Brochu ,
Harold N. Bryant ,
Jessica M. Theodor ,
Maureen A. O'Leary ,
Jonathan M. Adrain  and
Colin D. Sumrall
Christopher A. Brochu
Affiliation:
Department of Geology, Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60605. E-mail: cbrochu@fieldmuseum.org
Harold N. Bryant
Affiliation:
Royal Saskatchewan Museum, 2340 Albert Street, Regina, SK S4P 3V7 Canada
Jessica M. Theodor
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Box G-B205, Providence, Rhode Island 02912
Maureen A. O'Leary
Affiliation:
Department of Anatomical Sciences, Health Sciences Center T-8 (040), State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York 11794-8081
Jonathan M. Adrain
Affiliation:
Department of Geoscience, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242
Colin D. Sumrall
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Box G-B205, Providence, Rhode Island 02912
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In a recent Matters of the Record, Vermeij (1999) identifies what he regards as a fundamental problem with cladistic analysis. “The phylogenetic method,” he states (p. 431), “derives phylogeny in one part of the tree by relying on character-taxon relationships in another part of the tree, in direct violation of the principle that clades, once they have diverged from each other, are independent of one another.” Vermeij fails to appreciate the distinction between pattern-based cladograms, which are hierarchies founded on homology hypotheses, and logically contingent, process-based trees, which are depictions of temporal evolution. As a result, he treats cladograms as literal and direct estimates of evolution and thus confuses the treatment of characters and taxa in parsimony analyses with biological processes and interactions.

Type
Comment and Reply
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Winter 2001 , pp. 174 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Literature Cited

Fisher, D. C. 1994. Stratocladistics: morphological and temporal patterns and their relation to phylogenetic process. Pp. 133–171in Grande, L. and Rieppel, O., eds. Interpreting the hierarchy of nature: from systematic patterns to evolutionary theories. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Fox, D. L., Fisher, D. C., and Leighton, L. R. 1999. Reconstructing phylogeny with and without temporal data. Science 284:1816–1819.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Graybeal, A. 1998. Is it better to add taxa or characters to a difficult phylogenetic problem? Systematic Biology 47:9–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huelsenbeck, J. P., and Rannala, B. 1997. Maximum likelihood estimation of phylogeny using stratigraphic data. Paleobiology 23:174–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huelsenbeck, J. P., and Rannala, B. 2000. Using stratigraphic information in phylogenetics. Pp. 165–191in Wiens, J. J., ed. Phylogenetic analysis of morphological data. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
O'Keefe, F. R., and Sander, P. M. 1999. Paleontological paradigms and inferences of phylogenetic pattern: a case study. Paleobiology 25:518–533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poe, S. 1998. The effect of taxonomic sampling on accuracy of phylogeny reconstruction: test case of a known phylogeny. Molecular Biology and Evolution 15:1086–1090.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vermeij, G. J. 1999. A serious matter with character-taxon matrices. Paleobiology 25:431–433.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, P. J. 1998. A likelihood approach for estimating phylogenetic relationships among fossil taxa. Paleobiology 24:430–449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wheeler, W. C. 1992. Extinction, sampling, and molecular phylogenetics. Pp. 205–215in Novacek, M. J. and Wheeler, Q. D., eds. Extinction and phylogeny. Columbia University Press, New York.Google Scholar