in the alhambra (granada, spain), and in other moorish locations, several individuals of the original variety of myrtle, the emblematic plant of their gardens, have been identified and genetically authenticated. after microsatellite analysis, we differentiated between the wild form (myrtus communis l.) and two cultivated varieties: the one original to the alhambra, the moorish myrtle (subsp. ba...

Taxometric method, invented by Paul Meehl (1965) and developed by him and a number of colleagues, is a family of procedure for subjecting parts of a certain class of theories to risky tests. The theories in question postulate the existence of a latent category, the taxon, and its complement class. A taxon is negatively defined as a " non-arbitrary latent category. " It does not appear to be pos...

In a recent study, Steel and Sanderson defined and characterized phylogenetically decisive sets of taxon sets. A set is called phylogenetically decisive if regardless of the trees chosen for each of its taxon sets, as long as these trees are compatible with one another, their supertree is always unique. This implies that the sampled taxon sets always lead to a unique supertree, regardless what ...

Whether taxometrics yields inferential knowledge to something latent is partly but not wholly a semantic question. Although the single variables are manifest indicator scores of individuals, the statistics computed from them via postulates of the formalism are not mere data summaries and will be incorrect or meaningless if the structural conjectures are false. The unidirectional derivability fr...

BACKGROUND A common perception is that DNA barcode datamatrices have limited phylogenetic signal due to the small number of characters available per taxon. However, another school of thought suggests that the massively increased taxon sampling afforded through the use of DNA barcodes may considerably increase the phylogenetic signal present in a datamatrix. Here I test this hypothesis using a l...