Character evolution

In the study of phylogenetics or cladistics, researchers can look at the characters shared by a collection of species and then group them into what is called a clade.

[1] 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.

Although fairly effective, maximum parsimony (like any method of phylogenetic inference) may not recover the true course of evolution for a given feature.

However, Rindal and Brower [6] showed that the vast majority of the time, parsimony and model-based phylogenetic analyses of the same data sets gave results that were not significantly different from one another, implying that if parsimony is producing false hypotheses of relationships due to homoplasy, then the Maximum Likelihood or Bayesian methods are doing so as well.

His theory states that the characteristics an organism acquires throughout its life in order to adapt to its environment are passed down to its offspring.