Proportional Change and Patterns of Homoplasy: Sanderson and Donoghue Revisited

David L Hauser; George Boyajian

doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.1997.tb00243.x

Proportional Change and Patterns of Homoplasy: Sanderson and Donoghue Revisited

Cladistics. 1997 Mar;13(1-2):97-100. doi: 10.1111/j.1096-0031.1997.tb00243.x.

Authors

David L Hauser¹, George Boyajian²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Molecular and Medical Bioscience, University of Wales (College of Cardiff), Cardiff, CF1 3YF, U.K.
² Department of Geology, University of Pennsylvania, 240 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, U.S.A.

PMID: 34920638
DOI: 10.1111/j.1096-0031.1997.tb00243.x

Abstract

The effects of two parameters, (1) the number of taxa and (2) the percentage of characters that change per node (referred to as the amount of proportional change or APC) on the retention index (RI) and the consistency index (CI) were examined. Random data sets were generated with a variety of different combinations of the number of taxa and the APC; five replicates for each unique combination were generated producing a total of 660 data sets. Results suggest that both the number of taxa and the APC are significantly correlated with the CI. In data sets with more than seven taxa, the APC explains more variation in homoplasy than does the number of taxa. The RI was found to be very strongly correlated with the APC and only weakly correlated with the number of taxa.