Hi CKing,



thanks for your comments. Indeed, I knew that phylogenetic analysis was based on morpholgical characters in earlier years, but since molecular analysis has become quite fashonable and perhaps more inexpensive it seems to be "state of the art" in noadays. The point I wanted to come to was if experiense has shown that phylogenetic analysis based on molecular data are more reliable than based on morphometric analysis. I do not want to say that the "old fashoned" workers were all wrong, but some papers that are based on molecular data support evidence for a different phylogeny of species than the ones created by using morphological data.

I understand that molecular data can not explain everything, as well as using only morphological characters. A combination of both would perhaps be the best choice. Well, often enough the results of molecular data and the resulting phylogenetic trees strongly differ from the ones produced by morphological data (and vice versa).

PS Character choice, as well as character coding is a subjective process; different systematists see different numbers of characters when looking at the same part of the animal and they of course more likely than not code their characters differently.

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