Methods of systematic analysis: the relative superiority of phylogenetic systematics.

Abstract

The superiority of cladistic methods to both synthetic and phenetic methods is briefly advanced and reviewed. Cladistics creates testable hypotheses of phylogeny that also give a highly informative summary of available data. Thus it best fits the criteria for a method for determining the general reference classification in biology. For protistologists in particular, cladistics is especially useful. Inundated by an abundance of ultrastructural, biochemical, and cell biological information, protistologists could be greatly helped by the informative way in which cladistics orders and summarizes the data. In addition to classifying protist taxa, hypotheses about the evolution of cell organelles and cellular could be scientifically formulated and tested by cladistics . Because cladistic classifications best summarize the data, they would also be best for making predictions about taxa and characters. They would, for the same reason, be the most stable. Widespread adoption of cladistic methods would serve to stabilize the now fluid state of protist taxonomy. It is for all of these reasons that such methods best suit the needs of the evolutionary protistologist .