Asteraceae

Using the relatively new technique of cladistics, which analyzes the distribution and evolution of individual taxonomic characteristics among the taxa, the author and his collaborators have reconstructed the phylogeny within the family Asteraceae. Using various cladistic algorithms, "trees" of different kinds are generated, with the taxa at the tips of the branches. In each case, the objective is to construct the most parsimonious tree, the one with the fewest parallelisms or reversals in the evolution of the characters. The result is the most comprehensive elucidation of the evolutionary…