Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Cladistics
/kləˈdɪstɪks/noun
The method of classifying organisms strictly by branching order of descent, using shared derived characters.
The Greek roots
κλάδος
kládos
branch, shoot
Literally: “the business of branches”
Follow a root:κλάδος2 words
The story of the word
Willi Hennig published the system in German in 1950, working it out partly as a prisoner of war, and it reached English readers in 1966. The name came from opponents: Ernst Mayr called its practitioners cladists, meaning it as a jab, and they adopted the label. The method's hard rule is that shared ancestry counts and resemblance does not, which is why a crocodile is a closer relative of a sparrow than of a lizard.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1960s
Same family
cladecladogramphylogeny
In a sentence
Cladistics rearranged the family tree and left several old textbook groups with no members.