Mishler is now coordinating a world-wide effort to develop a phylogeny for all the green plants. When completed, this phylogeny will push plants light years ahead of animals as subjects of macroevolutionary study. Prof. Mishler, along with U.C. Museum of Paleontology Director, David Lindberg, teaches a hands-on course in phylogenetic reconstruction in Integrative Biology. If you are unsure of their relationships, consult the Virtual Paleobotany Laboratory. Evolutionary systematics interpretation of land plant evolution.
Paraphyletic groups give rise to other groups of the same rank.
This early version of evolutionary systematics was based on a very imprecise, subjective, and complicated set of rules that only scientists with lots of experience working with their organisms were able to use. The resulting phylogenies became impossible to reproduce other than by the specialists themselves. This practice of systematics was more art than science, and led to a call for more repeatable and objective methods. Phenetics A more rigorous and objective way of generating and choosing among phylogenies was numerical taxonomy or phenetic systematics . This method was made possible by the advent of computers in the 1960's because phenetics relies on extensive mathematical calculations.