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Cladistics can be thought of as k-means clustering in a Hamming space of individual organisms attributes and genetics, I think. A species is a tight cluster, an
by jaggederest 3y ago
Cladistics can be thought of as k-means clustering in a Hamming space of individual organisms attributes and genetics, I think. A species is a tight cluster, and as you go up towards phyla the clustering becomes more diffuse.
- BurningFrog 3y agoThat's a definition. I'm not convinced it's "clear" :)
- dekhn 3y agoit's not even a definition, it's a heuristic approximation. Likely the concept of species can't really be truly defined, but works best as a loose concept for organizing thinking about evolution.
- jhbadger 3y agoThat's more phenetics (clustering by shared similarities) than cladistics. Cladistics needs a hypothesis of shared ancestry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics