For Thursday

On Thursday we will carry out an exercise in class that involves constructing cladograms.

This link will serve as a refresher to the ideas behind cladistic analysis that we discussed earlier in the quarter and illustrates a simple mechanism for constructing a cladogram for taxon provided it doesn't have too many species. Please read this before Thursday.

Once the number of species becomes large the task of calculating the most parsiomonious tree rapidly becomes unmanageable. Fortunately computers are very good at this and there are numerous programs available which can be used, this site lists 386 phylogeny packages!