History of Cladistics
The term clade was introduced in 1958 by Julian Huxley after having been coined by Lucien Cuénot in 1940, cladistic by Cain and Harrison in 1960, and cladist (for an adherent of Hennig's school) by Mayr in 1965. Hennig referred to his own approach as phylogenetic systematics. From the time of his original formulation until the end of the 1980s cladistics remained a minority approach to both phylogenetics and taxonomy. However, in the 1990s it rapidly became the dominant set of methods of phylogenetics in evolutionary biology, because computers made it possible to process large quantities of data about organisms and their characteristics. At about the same time the development of effective polymerase chain reaction techniques allowed the application of cladistic methods to biochemical and molecular genetic traits of organisms as well as to anatomical ones, vastly expanding the amount of data available for phylogenetics.
The way for computational phylogenetics was paved by phenetics, a set of methods commonly used from the 1950s to 80s and to some degree later. Phenetics did not try to reconstruct phylogenetic trees, it tried to build dendrograms from similarity data; its algorithms required less computer power than phylogenetic ones.
Read more about this topic: Cladistics
Famous quotes containing the words history of and/or history:
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)