Talk:Cladistics

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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131020085621/http://www.bioon.com/book/biology/Bioinformatics/chapter-14.pdf to http://www.bioon.com/book/biology/Bioinformatics/chapter-14.pdf
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The first sentence of :
The cladistic method interprets each character state transformation implied by the distribution of shared character states among taxa (or other terminals) as a potential piece of evidence for grouping.
contains or implies the following technical terms:
* character
* character states
* character state transformation
* grouping
* taxa 
* terminals
— none of which have not been explained adequately — or at all! — to our intended audience: interested laymen.  Also, a "method [that] interprets [x] as a potential piece of evidence for [y]" sounds awfully vague and … unsystematic. So I've marked it as needing clarification.  It's beyond opaque; more akin, perhaps, to a black hole, that actively destroys any attempt at examination! ;-)  Will somebody - perhaps a topic expert who is also an expert educator and explainer - please step up and make this sentence — and ideally, the whole article — more accessible to the likes of me?  That is, to somebody who is fascinated by the diversity of the natural world, yet sure that scientific methods can help them make sense of it all.  yoyo (talk) 01:06, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too technical 

message: Being that there is no Wikipedia page for the Cladistic Revolution, I assume that this is the article that covers it. However, there is no reference within the article to the term and nor is there a redirection. This is a problem as several Wikipedia articles refer to such a thing as a "Cladistic Revolution". For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aysheaia
Not being at all familiar with how things are done on Wikipedia, it seems to me that the solution is to create a section within this article to define what the Cladistic Revolution is/was. 122.58.212.69 (talk) 05:36, 17 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cladistic Revolution? 

message: Wrote precisely delineating paraphyletic groups (grades) are fruitless to precisely delineate, especially for extinct species. There are actually two meanings to this: It is virtually impossible to do, and the results are meaningless. Contenting that both hold. In principle one could define "all descendents of X, which are not the descendents of the last common ancestor of Y and Z", or "all descendents of X which are not descendents of Y", but as stated before, under the mantra of parsimoniousness, one should make a case about why that would be a particular interesting group. It necessarily is another layer of unnecessary complexity, at least while it is still being figured out what the basic relationships are. Lumping e.g. stem groupings together, which is what typically happens, is anti-helpfull, as it appears as a validation that it's ok that it is not further resolved. Further resolving stuff would often reveal that the stem grouping do not belong together, but that the one of them is most closely related to the resulting branch, and that the other stem branches are usually further apart from each other. Purposely ignoring here all kinds of arguments that continued evolution brought certain groups closer together or further apart in the way they live, which probably changed anyway from the moment these branches separated. Jmv2009 (talk) 16:17, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  paraphyletic: fruitless