The Herpestidae are small terrestrial carnivores comprising 18 African and Asian genera, currently split into two subfamilies, the Herpestinae and the Galidiinae. The aim of this work was to resolve intra-familial relationships and to test the origin of sociality in the group. For this purpose we analysed sequences of the complete cytochrome b gene for 18 species of Herpestidae. The results sho...

Platyrrhine phylogeny has been investigated repeatedly with morphological characters and DNA nuclear gene sequences, with partially inconsistent results. Given the finding in the past decade that the mitochondrial genome is a potentially valuable source of phylogenetic information, we gathered DNA sequence data of a fragment of the 16S and the entire 12S mitochondrial genes. The objectives were...

Snakes of the tribe Thamnophiini represent an ecologically important component of the herpetofauna in a range of habitats across North America. Thamnophiines are the best-studied colubrids, yet little is known of their systematic relationships. A molecular phylogenetic study of 32 thamnophiine species using three complete mitochondrial genes (cytochrome b, NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2, and 12S ...

Moore Laboratory of Zoology and Department of Biology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA (JCH, ER) Department of Biological Sciences and Museum of Natural Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA (JEL, MSH) New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Albuquerque, NM 87104, USA (DJH) Department of Integrative Biology and M. L. Bean Life Science Museum, Brigham Young...

Although the c. 10,000 species in the Poaceae places it as the fifth largest flowering plant family, a number of biological features raise it to a unique position. The family has contributed crop species that provide about 80% of the annual global food (FAOSTAT 1999). In fact, four of the top crops that feed the world are cereal crops: wheat, rice, corn, and barley. This economic significance i...

Bacterial systematics has not yet reached a consensus for defining the fundamental unit of biological diversity, the species. The past half-century of bacterial systematics has been characterized by improvements in methods for demarcating species as phenotypic and genetic clusters, but species demarcation has not been guided by a theory-based concept of species. Eukaryote systematists have deve...

Aeolidida is one of the largest clades of nudibranchs with at least 560 known species. However, its systematics has not been studied in a comprehensive manner. Phylogenetic analyses of larger clades such as Nudibranchia or Cladobranchia have usually included a poor sample of aeolids. Furthermore, phylogenetic studies at the family or generic level in Aeolidida are a few and far between. The fir...

The assertion that phylogenetic inference algorithms are not authoritarian because results are repeatable, predictable and freely available misses the point that the authority resides in underlying algorithm models that are not cladistic. We show that optimization procedures can group using symplesiomorphy and that optimization is not always equivalent to cladistic argumentation. Because parsim...

Over the last three decades, the philosophy of Karl Raimund Popper has had a strong influence on the field of systematic biology. Unequivocally, no other philosopher's work has had such an influence during this formative period in systematics. Much, but not all, of the early discourse on Popper and systematics dealt with the philosophical basis of systematics as a science. More recently Popper'...