An Hennigian analysis of the Eukaryotae

As usual at the beginning of the week, this blog presents something in a lighter vein.

Homologies lie at the heart of phylogenetic analysis. They express the historical relationships among the characters, rather than the historical relationships of the taxa. As such, homology assessment is the first step of a phylogenetic analysis, while building a tree or network is the second step.

With a colleague (Mike Crisp, now retired), I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about how to mis-interpret homologies, and the consequences of this for any subsequent tree-building analysis. This article appeared in 1989 in the Australian Systematic Botany Society Newsletter 60: 24–26. Since this issue of the Newsletter is not online, presumably no-one has read this article since then. However, you should read it, and so I have linked to a PDF copy [1.2 MB] of the paper:
An Hennigian analysis of the Eukaryotae