Cladograms

There are many other phylogenetic algorithms that treat data somewhat differently, and result in phylogenetic trees that look like cladograms but are not cladograms.

Because of the astronomical number of possible cladograms, algorithms cannot guarantee that the solution is the overall best solution.

Cladograms are branching, tree-like structures used to represent lines of descent based on one or more evolutionary changes.

Cladograms that are supported by a large number and variety of different kinds of characters are viewed as more robust than those based on more limited evidence.

Different datasets and different methods, not to mention violations of the mentioned assumptions, often result in different cladograms.

Homoplasy and the choice among cladograms.

Inputting the data in various orders can cause the same algorithm to produce different "best" cladograms.

Most molecular evidence, however, produces cladograms more like this: citation If this is accurate, then the last common ancestor of turtles and birds lived later than the last common ancestor of lizards and birds.

Since the cladograms provide competing accounts of real events, at most one of them is correct.

Such is the nature of empirical science, and for this reason, most cladists refer to their cladograms as hypotheses of relationship.

There are many shapes of cladograms but they all have lines that branch off from other lines.

Using different algorithms on a single data set can sometimes yield different "best" cladograms, because each algorithm may have a unique definition of what is "best".