Taxonomy Red in Tooth and Claw 17

lowed him, the only characters that matter in identifying genealogical

relationships are shared derived characteristics. Marsupials, for exam-
ple, have many of their similarities not in virtue of being marsupials
but in virtue of their membership of the larger clade of the mammals:
most obviously their fur and the capacity of females to lactate. These
are inheritances derived from a deeper ancestor than the Mother-of-all-
Marsupials. Hence they tell us nothing about relationships within the
mammal clade; a character trait that evolves before a clade splits from
its ancestral stock cannot carry information about relationships within
that clade (though subsequently evolving modifications might do so).
This is a conceptual point; it does not depend on controversial claims
about evolutionary mechanisms. We illustrate it with a few antipodean
examples. The marsupials’ pouch, together with various aspects of their
dentition and physiology, are inheritances from the Marsupial Mother,
and hence those traits are informative about relationships within the
mammal clade. They are shared and derived. They evolved within the
mammal clade (they are derived) and they are shared across the spe-
cies descending from their point of origin in the mammal tree (hence
they are shared). Marsupials’ pouches mostly open toward the front of
the animal. Thus when a female kangaroo is at rest, the pouch opens
upward, and her joey is in no danger of falling out. But not all marsu-
pials have front-opening pouches. The opening of a wombat’s pouch
is posterior rather than anterior (otherwise it would tend to fill with
dirt as the wombat burrowed into the earth). This character is shared
and derived within the marsupials, and hence is evidence supporting
the genealogical proximity of the common wombat and the southern
and northern hairy-nose wombats. The pointy ears of the two hairy-
nosed species is a derived character that supports their status as sister
taxa, more closed related to each other than either is to the common
wombat.
Unlike evolutionary taxonomists, cladists did not expect shared
derived similarities between organisms to have special embryological
or ecological markers. Instead, they proposed to rely on the idea that
similarities due to convergent and parallel evolution would be rare
compared to similarities due to inheritance. Change is rare compared
to nonchange. This is an empirical but relatively uncontroversial claim
about evolutionary processes. On the basis of these assumptions, cla-
dists take it that phylogenetic hypotheses that minimize the number of
changes needed to account for observed patterns of similarity and dif-
ference have the best chance of being right. This method of detecting
phylogeny is known as parsimony analysis.8 A phylogenetic hypothesis
that minimizes the number of character state changes among (say) the