Re: Phylogenetics or phenetics?

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
John Harshman  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>jon rogers wrote:
>> I'd be interested to know if anyone has done a study to comparing
>> phylogenetics with phenetics? Preferably not just on a theoretical basis,
>> but also using practical examples?
>
>Comparing on what basis? The two philosophies attempt different things. 
>There was a considerable literature around 20 or more years ago about 
>which philosophy produced more stable classifications, but phylogenetics 
>won out not because it won that argument, but because phylogeny became 
>seen as a better goal than overall similarity in its own right.

It also depends on what question is being asked.  If Rogers meant the two
approaches to classification, then they can be compared only once one has
some agree-upon criterion, such as stability.

On the other hand, it is common for these two words to be used to denote two
methods of inferring phylogenies: "phylogenetic" methods being parsimony
methods, and "phenetic" methods being distance matrix methods and sometimes
also likelihood and Bayesian methods.  If that is the intent here, one could
compare them by their success at recovering the true phylogeny, in cases
such as computer simulations where one knows that.  I think that this
terminology is a poor one, and the terms should properly be applied to
approaches to classification.  I hope that this is what Rogers intended.

-- 
Joe Felsenstein         [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington,
 Box 357730, Seattle, WA 98195-7730 USA