Morphology, Shape and Phylogeny

Abstract

Norman MacLeod and Peter L. Forey, eds., 2002, Taylor and Francis Inc., New York, 308 p. (Hardcover, US$ 125.00) ISBN: 0-415-24074-3. Anyone who has ever coded a character matrix for phylogenetic analysis has asked themselves questions such as: “Is this ambulacrum long or short?” or “Is this sulcus wide and shallow, or narrow and deep?” Issues with coding shape characters are further compounded when coding a taxon using another researcher’s character descriptions because their concept of “narrow and deep” may not fully overlap with one’s own. How we code continuous variables for use in phylogenetic analysis is one of the most fundamental problems facing the use of morphological character data. A new, fourteen-chapter edited volume, Morphology, Shape and Phylogeny addresses this and related issues by bringing together a diverse group of biologists and paleontologists whose research straddles the gap between morphometrics and phylogenetics. The book is written largely from the morphometrics perspective and is an interesting companion to a similar edited work, Phylogenetic Analysis of Morphological Data (Wiens, 2000), written primarily from the phylogenetic perspective. Interestingly, only three authors participated in both books, and they jointly authored a single, complimentary chapter in each. Morphology, Shape and Phylogeny questions the use of morphometric data in phylogenetic inference. Morphometrics and phylogenetics are both schools of inquiry that have at their root the use of large character sets, but utilize these data for quite different purposes. Morphometrics is concerned with discovering the distances between individuals in …