Practice question

Natural phylogenetic classification that explicitly incorporates evolutionary branching patterns often termed cladistic classification because cladistics methodology reconstructs clades composed of common ancestor plus all descendant members using shared derived characters synapomorphies analyzed via parsimony or maximum likelihood. Artificial formal terminology does not connote evolutionary perspective, empirical alphabetical, formal generic labels. Cladistic approach refines natural classification adding explicit phylogenetic hypothesis distinguishing monophyly polyphyly paraphyly, employed by Engler Prantl early and later Cronquist Thorne Takhtajan. Distinguishing feature arrangement seeks to portray genealogy aligning taxonomic ranks with monophyletic groups rather than overall similarity alone and provides evolutionary explanation for character distribution.