Parsimony in Systematics: Biological and Statistical Issues

Quite recently "parsimony" has become the favored method for inferring phylogenies (evolutionary trees). The accompanying article by Elliott Sober discusses the philosophical issues relating to the status of parsimony from a somewhat different perspective than that adopted here. This review will discuss parsimony, its origins, its major variants, and its biological assumptions. For a review of a wider range of methods of inferring phylogenies, the reader may wish to consult Felsenstein (22). The present discussion does not cover the use of parsimony criteria as measures of how simply information is represented in a classification. Methods of classification and methods of inferring phylogeny are of course separate issues and only the latter are discussed here.

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