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Cladistics (/ k l ə ˈ d ɪ s t ɪ k s / klə-DIST-iks; from Ancient Greek κλάδος kládos 'branch') [1] is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups ("clades") based on hypotheses of most recent common ancestry.
A cladogram (from Greek clados "branch" and gramma "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an evolutionary tree because it does not show how ancestors are related to descendants, nor does it show how much they have changed, so many differing evolutionary trees can be ...
As computer-based cladistics matured in the 1990s, paleontologists were among the first zoologists to broadly adopt the system. [3] Progressive scrutiny and work upon dinosaurian interrelationships, with the aid of new discoveries that have shed light on previously uncertain relationships between taxa, have begun to yield a stabilizing ...
The science that tries to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and thus discover clades is called phylogenetics or cladistics, the latter term coined by Ernst Mayr (1965), derived from "clade". The results of phylogenetic/cladistic analyses are tree-shaped diagrams called cladograms ; they, and all their branches, are phylogenetic hypotheses.
In cladistics, originating in the work of Willi Hennig, 1950 onwards, each taxon is grouped so as to include the common ancestor of the group's members (and thus to avoid phylogeny). Such taxa may be either monophyletic (including all descendants) such as genus Homo , or paraphyletic (excluding some descendants), such as genus Australopithecus .
Some recent classifications based on modern cladistics have explicitly abandoned the term kingdom, ... the diagram below is an 'organization chart', ...
Human taxonomy is the classification of the human species within zoological taxonomy. The systematic genus, Homo, is designed to include both anatomically modern humans and extinct varieties of archaic humans.
Evolutionary taxonomy, evolutionary systematics or Darwinian classification is a branch of biological classification that seeks to classify organisms using a combination of phylogenetic relationship (shared descent), progenitor-descendant relationship (serial descent), and degree of evolutionary change.