Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
more parsimonious will be the general area cladogram analyzed, and for
that reason it will be chosen. Evaluation of items of error can be carried out
manually or with the program Component version 1.5 (Page 1989b).
From an epistemological point of view, general area cladograms rep-
resent testable hypotheses in the framework of Popper's (1959, 1963)
hypothetico-deductive method (Nelson and Platnick 1981; Platnick and Nel-
son 1978). However, some authors suggest that cladograms are not general
hypotheses in Popper's sense (Andersson 1996; Hull 1983). An important
aspect of general area cladograms is their retrodictive power (Morrone
1997). When we have obtained a general area cladogram, we may use it to
carry out predictions or retrodictions related to taxa still not analyzed (which
are expected to agree with the general pattern), with geological or tectonic
hypotheses, or the relative ages of biotas (when a molecular clock is avail-
able for some of the studied taxa).
There are fourteen cladistic biogeographic methods (Crisci et al. 2000;
Goyenechea et al. 2001; Humphries and Parenti 1999; Morrone 2004a;
Morrone and Crisci 1995). I will deal herein with component analysis (Nel-
son and Platnick 1981), Brooks parsimony analysis (BPA) (Wiley 1987),
three area statement analysis (Nelson and Ladiges 1991a, 1991c), tree
reconciliation analysis (Page 1990a), paralogy-free subtree analysis (Nel-
son and Ladiges 1996), dispersal-vicariance analysis (Ronquist 1997), area
cladistics (Ebach and Edgecombe 2001), and phylogenetic analysis for
comparing trees (Wojcicki and Brooks 2005). Six other methods, namely,
reduced consensus cladogram (Rosen 1978), ancestral species maps (Wi-
ley 1980, 1981), quantitative phylogenetic biogeography (Mickevich 1981),
component compatibility (Zandee and Roos 1987), quantification of com-
ponent analysis (Humphries et al. 1988), and vicariance event analysis
(Hovenkamp 1997), which have been applied occasionally (Crisci et al.
1991b; de Weerdt 1989; Hovenkamp 2001; Liebherr 1988; Noonan 1988;
Patterson 1981; Schuh and Stonedahl 1986; Solervicens 1987; van Soest
1993; van Veller et al. 2000; van Welzen 1992), are not dealt with here.
For details on these latter methods, see Humphries and Parenti (1999),
Goyenechea et al. (2001), and Morrone (2004a).
A recent biogeographic development that merits special comment here
is comparative phylogeography, also known as the regional (Avise 1996) or
