A morphological and anatomical survey was carried out of seedlings of 62 taxa of palms representing all major groups. The data were analyzed using cladistic parsimony analysis. Seedling data were analyzed independently and combined with adult morphological data. Outgroup selection was made within the family using the calamoids and Nypa fruticans; outside the family, the monocot family Dasypogon...

Practicing phylogenetic systematics as a sophisticated falsification research program provides a basis for claiming increased knowledge of sister species relationships and synapomorphies as evidence for those cladistic propositions. Research in phylogenetic systematics is necessarily cyclic, and the place where the positive shift in understanding occurs is subsequent to discovering the most par...

The xeromorphic Mexican spiraeas (S. hartwegiana and S. northcrajii1) are shown by cladistic and phenetic analysis to be more closely allied to Petrophytum, Kelseya, and Luetkea than to the more mesophytic Spiraea. Within Spiraea the Mexican spiraeas appear more closely related to the Old World subgenus Metaspiraea. The xeromorphic Mexican spiraeas, as well as Petrophytum, Kelseya and Luetkea, ...

We perform an evolutionary multivariate analysis of a sample of 54 Galactic globular clusters with high-quality colour-magnitude diagrams and well-determined ages. The four parameters adopted for the analysis are: metallicity, age, maximum temperature on the horizontal branch, and absolute V magnitude. Our cladistic analysis breaks the sample into three novel groups. An a posteriori kinematical...

Morphometric methods were used with 40 morphological characters from each of 110 individuals collected from 11 populations of the Ixeris chinensis complex to test hypotheses regarding infraspecific taxa. Individuals of the nearest relative I. tamagawaensis were included as an outgroup. To utilize structual associations of the original data and the cumulative values of character variation, a mod...

Recently a new clustering algorithm was developed, useful in phylogenetic systematics and taxonomy. It derives a hierarchy from (dis)similarity data on a simple and rather natural way. It transforms a given dissimilarity by an iterative approach. Each iteration step consists of ranking the objects under consideration according to their pairwise dissimilarity and calculating the Euclidian distan...

Research on media effects has documented the media’s infl uence on beliefs and behavior while cross-cultural psychology has documented the effects of the language used in communication on identifi cation with the ingroup and the outgroup. Media usage in the outgroup language should, therefore, affect identifi cation patterns. This research investigates media effects in the acculturation process...

Phylogenetic relationships within the “symmetrical” hermit crab family Pylochelidae were analyzed for 41 of the 45 species and subspecies currently considered valid. In the analyses, 78 morphological characters comprised the data matrix and the outgroup consisted of Thalassina anomala, a member of the Thalassinidae, and Munida quadrispina, a member of the Galatheidae. A poorly resolved strict c...

MacClade is a Macintosh-based software package that uses the techniques of cladistic analysis to explore evolutionary patterns. Although designed for the Macintosh platform, MacClade delivers excellent results on POs when used with MacOs emulators. This paper describes a novel and effective exercise that allows undergraduate biOlogy majors to test a hypothesis about behavioural evolution in ins...

The ability of mimicry to signal affiliation to, and elicit affiliation from, the mimicked person has generated great interest, but no definitive account of these phenomena has emerged. While affiliation is often cited as the driving force behind mimicry, ...