kladizmus

Kladizmus is a method of phylogenetic analysis that groups organisms based on shared derived characteristics, known as synapomorphies. These characteristics are believed to have evolved in a common ancestor and been passed down to its descendants. The fundamental principle of cladistics is that organisms are classified into monophyletic groups, or clades, which include an ancestral species and all of its descendants. A key concept is the distinction between ancestral (plesiomorphic) and derived (apomorphic) traits. Only synapomorphies are used to infer relationships, as they indicate common ancestry. Homoplasy, which includes convergence and reversals, can lead to misleading groupings and must be identified and excluded from the analysis. Cladistic analysis is often represented visually using phylogenetic trees, where branching patterns illustrate hypothesized evolutionary relationships. The goal of cladistics is to reconstruct the evolutionary history of life by identifying the nested hierarchy of clades. This approach has become the dominant methodology in evolutionary biology for classifying and understanding the relationships between living and extinct organisms.