Cladistics

Cladistics (Ancient Greek: κλάδος, klados, "branch") is an approach to classification in which items are grouped together based on whether or not they have one or more shared unique characteristics that come from the group's common ancestor and are not present in more distant ancestors. Therefore, members of the same group are thought to share a common history and are considered to be more closely related.

The original method for cladistic analysis and the school of taxonomy derived from it originated in the work of the German entomologist Willi Hennig, who referred to it as "phylogenetic systematics" (also the title of his 1966 book); the use of the terms cladistics and clade was popularized by other researchers. The techniques and sometimes the names have been successfully applied in other disciplines: for example, to determine the relationships between the surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, or also between 53 manuscripts of the Sanskrit Carakasaṃhitā Vimānasthāna.