Compare and contrast cladistics and phylogeny. What are their advantages and disadvantages? Which is the most useful in understanding how an organism developed into its current form? Which concept most strongly supports your opinion about the origin of any given organism?
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Answer:
Cladistics is concerned with entire branchings. This way groups all the descendants from a common radiation into a clade as a related group and no others. The clades are monophyletic. This is a narrower definition of an older, less precise concept.
Phylogeny is a way of tracking evolutionary relationships based on shared characters. Originally this used Linnaeus' artificially defined levels of taxonomy. This method allows convergent characters to be grouped despite their having followed a separate evolutionary path. Taxonomy is the rank levels while phylogeny is the path through the ranks.
Cladistics is a way of grouping the related branches based on sharing derived characters within the group. However these characters are not found in other species except by convergence.