Talk:Cladogram

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Cladogram article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Evolutionary biology C‑class Mid‑importance

	Evolutionary biology portal This article is part of WikiProject Evolutionary biology, an attempt at building a useful set of articles on evolutionary biology and its associated subfields such as population genetics, quantitative genetics, molecular evolution, phylogenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology. It is distinct from the WikiProject Tree of Life in that it attempts to cover patterns, process and theory rather than systematics and taxonomy. If you would like to participate, there are some suggestions on this page (see also Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ for more information) or visit WikiProject Evolutionary biologyEvolutionary biologyWikipedia:WikiProject Evolutionary biologyTemplate:WikiProject Evolutionary biologyEvolutionary biology
C	This article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Tree of Life C‑class Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Tree of Life, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of taxonomy and the phylogenetic tree of life on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Tree of LifeWikipedia:WikiProject Tree of LifeTemplate:WikiProject Tree of Lifetaxonomic
C	This article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Not a cladogram!

The first figure of the article, the unrooted myosin supergene family tree, is NOT a cladogram. It's distance-matrix tree! (check the abstract of the original paper). I'm removing it.

I suggest replacing it with the second figure of this paper, the famous 1999 dinosaur phylogeny of Paul Sereno, which is nicely illustrated. I think it should qualify as fair use. --Earrnz (talk) 03:03, 7 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

simple cladistics diagram

Isn't there a bug on the second diagram? Traits B,C are shown on the line pointing to species 3 which only has trait A, it should be on the line pointing to species 1 surely? --86.179.186.239 (talk) 12:44, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, anonymous, thanks for pointing it out. I will correct it ASAP.--Earrnz (talk) 03:32, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How to read a cladistics diagram

The article contains a section on what a cladistics diagram is, and a section on how to generate one. What's missing is an intermediate section on how to read one.Christopher King (talk) 14:58, 28 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This article incorrectly defines a cladogram. There is no consensus about the exact meaning of the term, and the second sentence contradicts itself. The nodes are the ancestors and quite clearly indicate the relationships between the terminals and the nodes, and even other nodes.See:

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad3.htm

http://www.bu.edu/gk12/eric/cladogram.pdf

http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/ahp/CLAS/CLAS.Clad.html

There are a bunch of others, but I think this proves the point. 66.168.116.107 (talk) 16:50, 15 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You are right that the term is used to cover two kinds of diagram. One, the most common, is when the terminals are known taxa, extant or extinct, and the branches show the hypothesised evolutionary relationships between them. The nodes can then be interpreted as hypothetical ancestors. Note that in the Hennigian approach, if a node is given the characters inferred from a cladogram and the construction process repeated, it will become a terminal. That's what I mean by the nodes being "hypothetical" ancestors. This appears to be the usage intended by the last two links you put above (the first doesn't seem to work). The second kind of diagram is when the nodes are also known taxa and some method other than cladistics is used to construct the diagram – such diagrams are sometimes called phylograms. Unfortunately many sources are not clear on these differences.

I don't think the second sentence is as clear as it could be, but it's not contradictory: a cladogram in the original Hennigian sense is not a full evolutionary tree: the arc lengths have no meaning, and the nodes are not known ancestral taxa. All it shows is the inferred branching order. Some thought is needed as to how the second sentence can be improved. Peter coxhead (talk) 00:27, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]