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Cladistics: Clades
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Cladistics is a particular school of classification which uses phylogenetic hypotheses as its theoretical basis. This involves studying the evolutionary relationships between entities with reference to the common ancestry of the group. The importance of evolution in analysing organisational similarity is due to the fact that evolution generates changes in firms. These changes in organisational attributes are the observations by which investigators distinguish the similar from the dissimilar. Therefore, it would seem essential to consider the role of evolution and evolutionary relationships when constructing organisational system classifications.
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Cladistics is a technique for arranging classes or taxa into a set of hierarchical groups determined through the distribution of ancestral and derived character states across the taxa. The hierarchical arrangement is often described as a bifurcating one, or tree-like, and is a hypothesis about the ancestor-descendant relationships between taxa. The form of a particular cladistic tree is determined by the distribution of derived character states amongst taxa. Derived character states are those that have changed from earlier, ancestral forms. Cladistic analysis was developed in the context of determining biological evolutionary relationships, but the technique has recently seen much use in the study of cultural evolution where the taxa arranged may be artefact classes, languages, or human behaviour classes.
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In Cladistics and Archaeology, Michael O’Brien and Lee Lyman explore the application of cladistics to archaeology by considering artifacts as human phenotypic characters. Their fundamental premise is that particular kinds of characters (style, artifact type, tool) can be used to create historically meaningful nested taxa. Further, they argue that this approach offers a means of building connections and “life histories” of archaeological artifacts.
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Cladistics provides systematists with one very handy feature. Due to its bipolar character states (either a species has a given character or it doesn't — there's no in-between), cladistics lends itself very readily to
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Cladistics is especially significant in paleontology, as it points out gaps in the fossil evidence. It is ... felt to be more objective than fossil study, which of necessity extrapolates from a limited number of finds that may or may not be representative of the whole.
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The third international course on cladistics and polychaetes will take place in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain, from June 21 to July 9, 2004. The course comprises two units. The first, conducted between June 21 and July 4, will consist of the course itself and will deal with cladistic theory and practice with particular reference to polychaetes. The second, conducted between July 5-9, is the International Polychaete Conference at UAM. Cladistics, or phylogenetic systematics, is one ofthe more important recent intellectual movements in systematics. Cladistic techniques are now routinely applied to problems in the systematics of polychaetes by specialists around the world.
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