Arthropods are a huge and diverse group with a long history.
Currently, Wheeler is engaged in the study of their relationships through analysis of a large number of taxa and the combination of molecular and morphological data. This approach allows for less limited sampling of major lineages in a taxonomic sense and for expanding the horizons of information. On the theoretical front, Wheeler has been involved in the generalization of character optimization techniques to directly optimize nucleic acid sequence characters without performing multiple alignment. If this can be accomplished, DNA data and morphological information can be simultaneously optimized via the same epistemological framework. This will allow a joint hypothesis of relationship to be erected and tested without regard to the source of phylogenetic information.