Heritable phenotypic variation presumably summarizes variation in many genes. Soon it will be possible to have available for study most or all of the genome of many species. Some phenotypic characters become redundant with these voluminous data sets in phylogenetic analysis. Other characters are epigenetic and cannot be summarized by the genome. Certain important information relevant to character state adjacency or additivity is not available from nucleotide data itself. We propose a method to discriminate between redundant phenotypic data and those that offer novel information.
Keywords: phylogeny, cladistics
The ESA 2001 Annual Meeting - 2001: An Entomological Odyssey of ESA