Abstract
SummaryThe effect of directing characters on cladistic analysis is discussed. Characters can conflict because of the character state membership of the EUs, the ordering of character states, or direction. Conflicts of characters were analyzed in twenty‐three data sets containing a total of 1024 characters. At least 93 percent of character conflicts in these data sets were not due to incorrectly hypothesized direction. Most character conflicts are caused by similarities among EUs that are due to parallelisms or reversals that were not recognized by the systematise Arguments against a priori directing of characters are presented. It is recommended that an undirected analysis be performed first and that the undirected tree be directed subsequently.
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