What evolves and what does not in a Darwinian paradigm

Increasingly, our community uses phylogenetic tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Often, these tests are oriented toward establishing if a certain charismatic behavioral or ecological condition has evolved once or multiple times. In many cases, though, the original character coding of the trait of interest (such as “highly social”) is not appropriate for cladistic analysis. Analogous conditions and syndromes that differ in detail do not satisfy the same criteria of homology that a morphological character would. In many cases, misinformative and poorly coded behavioral or ecological characters are retained in analyses when morphological traits would have been recoded and the original concepts discarded, as is appropriate. Thus, to say that highly social behavior evolved more than once is of little use when there is no description of what, exactly, evolved more than once. Our community will make better progress when we are willing to look past convenient labels of syndromes and seek more detailed information prior to phylogenetic analysis.