Talk:Phenetics

Untitled

"Phenetics must not be confused with phonetics" HA! Great little play on words. Jeeb 2 July 2005 00:20 (UTC)

Ouch! I'll need to rewrite most of this article.

Confusion?

This article appears to confuse Phenetics on the one hand and Numerical Phenetics (better known as Numerical Taxonomy), on the other hand. - Dendrid (talk) 06:10, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Requesting comments on a proposal

A merger between the articles Phenetics with Linnean taxonomy has been proposed here. The proposal arose while examining Phenetics with a view of making it more explicit in the article Biological classification and to clearly differentiate cladistics from it. Since the subject is of relevance to this article, may I request comments from the watchers and maintainers of this article on this issue. AshLin (talk) 06:08, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Vide this discussion the proposal has been removed. The old merger proposal with Numerical taxonomy has also been reverted. AshLin (talk) 07:30, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Phenetics has nothing to do with Linneus' classification.--Trouveur de faits (talk) 23:47, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Unclear text

The following text, under the heading "Differences from ME" (with ME not explained above) is, in my opinion, neither necessary nor comprehensible. Minimum evolution currently redirects to Maximum parsimony (phylogenetics), although it is not explained there. I don't think that it is helpful to the reader to have this very dense material on this page:

Like phenetics, minimum evolution uses pairwise distances, and like the molecular version of phenetics it is used for molecular analysis, but unlike phenetics it uses an optimality criterion, additive trees, tree tests, and tree scores, which places it closer to phylogenetics, and like cladistics it uses a parsimony principle. ML (maximum likelihood), BI (Bayesian Inference), clique analysis (character compatibility), and cladistics all use an optimality criterion, additive trees, tree tests, and tree scores.

Sminthopsis84 (talk) 05:26, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

It's not dense nor anything similar, but, in any case, the point is that it is helpful to the reader because otherwise the article would be incomplete. ME uses pairwise distance like phenetics (and also neighbour-joiniing which I forgot to mention), so it is similar to it but more similar to phylogenetics. It grew out of molecular phenetics. I should have given another reference (Van de Peer, Phylogenetic Inference Based on Distance Methods at 2.ib.unicamp.br). Also, as you point out, the MP article does not even mention ME, and says MP was invented by Fitsch but Fitsch parsimony is an optimality criterion and others were invented before--they are all MP--the 1st was by Camin-Sokal in '65. I have used Camin-Sokal myself and also Dollo and Wagner. Anyways, there should be an article on ME.--Trouveur de faits (talk) 18:40, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

References

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Phenetics/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

"phenetics, also known as numerical taxonomy" - only among those who have not read the original literature of the field of numerical taxonomy. Sokal and Sneath (1963) and Sneath and Sokal (1973) clearly define the field of numerical taxonomy in general terms to include both phenetics and cladistics. The battle they won was against those who objected to numerical/statistical methods that might involve the use of computers in most any aspect of taxonomy.

Last edited at 00:55, 30 June 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 02:49, 30 April 2016 (UTC)