cladists

Cladists are scientists who practice cladistics, a method of classification used in biology. Cladistics aims to organize living organisms into groups called clades, where each clade consists of an ancestor and all of its descendants. This system is based on shared derived characteristics, also known as synapomorphies, which are traits that evolved in a common ancestor and are passed down to its offspring.

The fundamental principle of cladistics is to infer evolutionary relationships by identifying these shared derived characteristics. Organisms that share more recent common ancestors are considered more closely related than those that share only distant ancestors. This approach contrasts with older classification systems that might group organisms based on superficial similarities or convergent evolution, where unrelated organisms evolve similar traits independently.

Cladistic analysis often involves the construction of phylogenetic trees, also known as cladograms. These diagrams visually represent the hypothesized evolutionary relationships between different groups of organisms. The branching patterns of the tree indicate the order in which different clades diverged from common ancestors. Cladistics is a widely used and influential approach in modern systematics, the study of the diversification of life and the evolutionary relationships among taxa. It provides a rigorous framework for understanding the history of life on Earth.