| Phenotypic characters are essential to study the evolution of extant and extinct life forms and to reconstruct the tree of life. Inside the cladistics theory, parsimony is used by a large majority of systematists working on phenotypic characters, whereas 3ta is much less widespread but has triggered important debates. Many important differences in the interpretation of the cladistic theory exist between these methods, e.g. meaning and treatment of reversals, character representation as ‘data-matrices’ in parsimony (ordered and unordered), and as rooted trees (hierarchies) in 3ta. Although 3ta has received severe criticism, mostly focused in the use of software intended to be used in parsimony, only a few empirical studies have compared these methods so... |
