Clade

A clade (from Ancient Greek κλάδος, klados, "branch") or monophylum (see monophyletic) is a group consisting of an ancestor and all its descendants, a single "branch" on the "tree of life".^[1] The ancestor may be an individual, a population or even a species (extinct or extant). Many familiar groups, rodents and insects for example, are clades; others, like lizards and monkeys, are not (lizards excludes snakes, monkeys excludes apes and humans). Increasingly, taxonomists try to avoid naming taxa that are not clades.

Etymology

The term "clade" was coined in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley to refer to the result of cladogenesis, a concept Huxley borrowed from Bernhard Rensch.^[1][2]

Definitions

Clade and ancestor

A clade is by definition monophyletic, meaning it contains one ancestor (which can be an organism, a population, or a species) and all its descendants.^{[note 1][3][4]} The ancestor can be known or unknown; any and all members of a clade can be extant or extinct.

Clades and phylogenetic trees

The science that tries to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and thus discover clades is called phylogenetics or cladistics, the latter term being derived from "clade" by Ernst Mayr (1965). The results of phylogenetic/cladistic analyses are tree-shaped diagrams called cladograms; they, and all their branches, are phylogenetic hypotheses.^[5]

Three methods of defining clades are featured in phylogenetic nomenclature: node-, stem-, and apomorphy-based (see here for detailed definitions).

Terminology

The relationship between clades can be described in several ways:

• A clade located within a clade is said to be nested within that clade. In the diagram, the hominoid clade, the apes and humans, is nested within the primate clade.
• Two clades are sisters if they have an immediate common ancestor. In the diagram, lemurs and lorises are sister clades.
• A clade A is basal to a clade B if A branches off the lineage leading to B before B 's first member. In the diagram to the right, the strepsirrhine clade, including the lemurs and lorises, is basal to the hominoids, the apes and humans. Some authors have used "basal" differently to mean a clade that is "more primitive" or less species-rich than its sister clade; others consider this usage to be incorrect.^[6]

Nomenclature and taxonomy

The idea of a clade did not exist in pre-Darwinian Linnaean taxonomy, which was based by necessity only on internal or external morphological similarities between organisms – although as it happens, many of the better known animal groups in Linnaeus' original Systema Naturae (notably among the vertebrate groups) do represent clades. The phenomenon of convergent evolution is however responsible for many cases where there are misleading similarities in the morphology of groups that evolved from different lineages.

With the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution in 1859, the idea was born that groups used in a system of classification should represent branches on the evolutionary tree of life. In the century and a half since then, taxonomists have increasingly worked to make the taxonomic system reflect evolution. When it comes to naming, however, this principle is not always compatible with the traditional rank-based nomenclature. In the latter, only taxa associated with a rank can be named, yet there are not enough ranks to name a long series of nested clades; also, taxon names cannot be defined in a way that guarantees them to refer to clades. For these and other reasons, phylogenetic nomenclature has been developed; it is still controversial.

See also

• Binomial nomenclature
• Biological classification
• Cladistics
• Crown group
• Paraphyly
• Phylogenetic nomenclature
• Phylogenetics
• Polyphyly

Notes

1. ↑ A semantic case has been made that the name should be "holophyletic," but this term has not acquired widespread use. For more information, see holophyly

References

External links

Look up clade in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Evolving Thoughts: Clade
• DM Hillis, D Zwickl & R Gutell. "Tree of life". An unrooted cladogram depicting around 3000 species.
• Phylogenetic systematics, an introductory slide-show on evolutionary trees University of California, Berkeley

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