Abstract
Let us be clear from the beginning-I am writing to criticize numerical taxonomy, not quantitative systematics. I am sure that measurement and mathematical methods will and should be much more widely employed in systematic studies. It should also be understood that numerical taxonomy, by which I mean specifically the doctrine and methods outlined by Sokal and Sneath (1963) in their book of this title, is to me hot without interest, import, and potential usefulness for systematic biology. But I intend to show that in at least one important respect, numerical taxonomy is headed in the wrong direction. I am not going to attempt to deal with mathematical questions, and I am going to skip over the obvious objections based on the difficulty of properly analyzing characters, so that I can get to the subject that interests me most. While considering this fault in numerical taxonomy, I hope to bring the criticism around to a more constructive position by hinting at an approach to systematics that the numerical taxonomists might find worth trying. The aspect I have chosen to discuss deals with phyletic convergence, a term that I here interpret broadly to include the finergrained phenomenon, parallelism. Michener and Sokal (1957) make the following statement:
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