cladism


Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Medical, Wikipedia.

cladism

[′kla‚diz·əm]
(systematics)
A theory of taxonomy by which organisms are grouped and ranked on the basis of the most recent phylogenetic branching point.
References in periodicals archive ?
They argue that cladism is appropriately applied whenever groups are diverging.
7 In addition to essentialism, pheneticism, and cladism, there is a fourth school of classification - evolutionary taxonomy - which uses both genealogy and adaptive similarity for individuating taxa, I mention this school only to set it aside; it fails to offer a nonarbitrary criterion for when adaptive similarity matters more than propinquity of descent, and vice versa (Sober [1993]).
A new perspective on the race debate
The history of cladism might have suited Cronin's 'whig' methodology very well.
The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today
Encyclopedia browser ?
Full browser ?