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9 - How to Study Classification: Consensus Techniques and General Classifications

from Part IV - How to Study Classification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2020

David M. Williams  and
Malte C. Ebach
David M. Williams
Affiliation:
Natural History Museum, London
Malte C. Ebach
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
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Summary

In 1972, Edward N. Adams III published what might be the first paper on consensus techniques for use in biological classification. He addressed the following question: ‘… can we combine the information from rival classifications into a new, hopefully more accurate classification? Such a consensus of the rivals is useful both in tree comparison and tree discovery’ (Adams 1972, p. 390). Since Adams’ paper, nearly half a century ago, numerous consensus tree techniques have been proposed, numerous critiques of each have been published and an almost infinite number of suggestions have been made as to how to use one of them, some of them, any of them, all of them, or none of them (Bininda-Emonds 2004a, 2004b). Alongside this avalanche of technical detail are discussions concerning supertrees (which are a form of consensus analysis) and supermatrices, the latter being an extension of the ‘combining data’ debate (Sanderson et al. 1998, see the following Chapter 10). Again, as with the methods of data analysis described in Chapter 8, we do not intend to discuss each and every consensus technique in detail but deal with what we understand to be the basic issues (on the details of consensus methods, we make some suggestions in the Further Reading section below).

Type
Chapter
Information
Cladistics
A Guide to Biological Classification
 , pp. 237 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

References

Adams, EN. 1972. Consensus techniques and the comparison of taxonomic trees. Systematic Zoology 21: 390–397.Google Scholar
Baum, BR. 1992. Combining trees as a way of combining data sets for phylogenetic inference, and the desirability of combining gene trees. Taxon 41: 3–10.Google Scholar
Bininda-Emonds, ORP. (ed.) 2004a Phylogenetic Supertrees: Combining Information to Reveal the Tree of Life. Kluwer/Academic Press, Dordrecht.Google Scholar
Bininda-Emonds, ORP. 2004b. The evolution of supertrees. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 19: 315–322.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bininda-Emonds, ORP., Gittleman, J. & Steel, M. 2002. The (Super)Tree of Life: procedures, problems, and prospects. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 33: 265–289.Google Scholar
de Queiroz, A. & Gatesy, J. 2006. The supermatrix approach to systematics. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 22: 34–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, AD. 1986. Consensus supertrees: the synthesis of rooted trees containing overlapping sets of labeled leaves. Journal of Classification 3: 335–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mickevich, MF. & Platnick, NI. 1989. On the information content of classifications. Cladistics 5: 33–47.Google Scholar
Nelson, G. & Platnick, NI. 1981. Systematics and Biogeography: Cladistics and Vicariance. Columbia University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Ragan, MA. 1992. Matrix representation in reconstructing phylogenetic relationships among the eukaryotes. Biosystems 28: 47–55.Google Scholar
Sanderson, MJ., Purvis, A. & Henze, C. 1998. Phylogenetic supertrees: assembling the trees of life. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 13: 105–109.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, M. 1996. Majority-rule reduced consensus methods and their use in bootstrapping. Molecular Biology and Evolution 13: 437–444.Google Scholar

Further Reading

These are two useful summaries of the methods available at that time. Bear in mind that most contributions to Bininda-Emonds (2004) are still immersed in finding better methods rather than exploring the actual data.

Bininda-Emonds, ORP, Gittleman, JL. & Steel, MA. 2002. The (Super)Tree of Life: procedures, problems, and prospects. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 33: 265–289.Google Scholar
Bininda-Emonds, ORP. (ed.) 2004. Phylogenetic Supertrees: Combining Information to Reveal the Tree of Life. Kluwer/Academic Press, Dordrecht.Google Scholar

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