Quantitative approaches to phylogenetics
pp. 257-294
in: Winfried Henke, Ian Tattersall (eds), Handbook of Paleoanthropology, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
This chapter reviews Hennigian, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian approaches to quantitative phylogenetic analysis and discusses their strengths and weaknesses and protocols for assessing the relative robustness of one's results. Hennigian approaches are justified by the Darwinian concepts of phylogenetic conservatism and the cohesion of homologies, embodied in Hennig's Auxiliary Principle, and applied using outgroup comparisons. They use parsimony as an epistemological tool. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian likelihood approaches are based on an ontological use of parsimony, choosing the simplest model possible to explain the data. All methods identify the same core of unambiguous data in any given data set, producing highly similar results. Disagreements most often stem from insufficient numbers of unambiguous characters in one or more of the data types. If analyses based on different types of data or using different methods of phylogeny reconstruction, or some combination of both, do not produce the same results, more data are needed. New developments in the application of phylogenetic methods in paleoanthropology have resulted in major advances in the understanding of morphological character development, modes of speciation, and the recent evolutionary history of the human species.