Stratocladistics is a technique in
phylogenetics
In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups ...
of making
phylogenetic inferences using both
geological
Geology () is a branch of natural science concerned with Earth and other astronomical objects, the features or rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Modern geology significantly overlaps all other Ear ...
and
morphobiological data. It follows many of the same rules as
cladistics
Cladistics (; ) is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups (" clades") based on hypotheses of most recent common ancestry. The evidence for hypothesized relationships is typically shared derived c ...
, using
Bayesian logic to quantify how good a phylogenetic hypothesis is in terms of debt and
parsimony. However, in addition to the morphological debt that is used to determine phylogenetic dissimilarities in cladistics, there is also
stratigraphic
Stratigraphy is a branch of geology concerned with the study of rock layers (strata) and layering (stratification). It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks.
Stratigraphy has three related subfields: lithost ...
debt which adds the dimension of time to the equation.
Although stratocladistics has been viewed with suspicion by some workers, it represents a total evidence approach that has some advantages over traditional cladistic approaches. For example, stratocladistics has been shown to outperform simple parsimony in tests based on simulated data and stratocladistics has better resolution than simple cladistics, with fewer equally parsimonious trees than in a basic cladistic analysis.
References
Further reading
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External links
{{cite web , title = StrataPhy, url=http://www.uv.es/pe/2008_1/142/index.html — software for stratocladistic reconstructions
Phylogenetics