Seminars on Science: Diversity of Fishes

The core concept of phylogenetic systematics is the use of derived or apomorphic characters to reconstruct common ancestry relationships and the grouping of taxa based on common ancestry. This concept, first formalized by Hennig (1950, 1966), has been slowly, and not so quietly, changing the nature of systematics. Why should we be interested in this approach? What about phylogenetic systematics is different from traditional systematics? The answer is simple: classifications that are not known to be phylogenetic are possibly artificial and are, therefore, useful only for identification and not for asking questions about evolution. There are two other means of making statements of relationship: traditional systematics and phenetics. Traditional systematic methods employ intuition. In practical terms, intuition is character weighting. The scientist studies a group of organisms, selects the character(s) believed to be important (i.e., conservative), and delimits species and groups of species based on these characters. Disagreements usually arise when different scientists think different characters are important. It is difficult to evaluate the evolutionary significance of groups classified by intuition because we do not know why they were created or whether they represent anything real in nature. Because these groups may not be defined at all or may be defined by characters that have no evolutionary significance, such groups may be artificial. Phenetics is an attempt to devise an empirical method for determining taxonomic