"If you're reading Wiens, that's the state of the art right there. There are lots of ways of coding morphological characters and he's tried most of them."



Me:

That is great except that he calls it "character analysis" instead of character coding. Character coding is a means of encoding a character so that it can be fed into the computer for phylogenetic analysis. The encoding process does not guarantee that a character is homologous, i.e. that it is a good character. The excellence of a systematic analysis depends on the goodness of the characters, not on the ability to encode taxonomic noise for analysis. I wish Wiens would spend more time developing new methods for eliminating phylogenetic noise instead of inventing new ways to encode it. Anyway, these methods mean little if the results are unreliable. Given the fact that morphological characters are often adaptive and given the fact that the rates of morphological change differ greatly within and among different lineages, morphological analysis will remain an inferior method as far as delimiting holophyletic groups (the holy grail of cladism) is concerned. Wiens' methods may be the last stand for the morphological cladists who are still holding out instead of switching to molecular systematics.

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