What is a cladogram, anyway?
Jonathan R. Wagner Betty Cunningham wrote: After hearing on the news of the recent camel/llama cross, I’m suddenly wondering how cladistics would show such an animal if it could have offspring. It is important to bear in mind what a cladogram is and is not. A cladogram is a branching diagram representing the most parsimonious distribution of derived characters within a set of taxa. We may use this distribution as an hypothesis of the evolutionary propinquity [(kinship)] of those organisms. That is, we can use it to formulate hypotheses based on the question “which taxa are more closely related to each other than to other taxa.” While this is an added layer of interpretation, it is consistent with the principle of parsimony. A cladogram is most emphatically not a description of the pattern that evolution took in producing the taxa under study. Within the confines of “A is more closely related to B than to C” there are a number of possible actual evolutionary sequences which may have occ
