Urticaceae is a family with more than 2000 species, which contains remarkable morphological diversity. It has undergone many taxonomic reorganizations, and is currently the subject of further systematic studies. To gain more resolution in systematic studies and to better understand the general patterns of character evolution in Urticaceae, based on our previous phylogeny including 169 accession...

Many questions in evolutionary biology are best addressed by comparing traits in different species. Often such studies involve mapping characters on phylogenetic trees. Mapping characters on trees allows the nature, number, and timing of the transformations to be identified. The parsimony method is the only method available for mapping morphological characters on phylogenies. Although the parsi...

Greater phylogenetic signal is often found in parsimony-based analyses of third codon positions of protein-coding genes relative to their corresponding first and second codon positions, even for early-derived ("basal") clades. We used the Soltis et al. (2000; Bot. J. Linn. Soc. 133:381-461) data matrix of atpB and rbcL from 567 seed plants to quantify how each of six factors (observed character...

A novel approach to analyzing time series generated by complex systems, such as markets, is presented. The basic idea of the approach is the Law of Self-Similar Evolution, according to which any complex system develops self-similarly. There always exist some internal laws governing the evolution of a system, say of a market, so that each of such systems possesses its own character regulating it...

In The Origin of Species, Darwin proposed his principle of divergence of character (a process now termed "character displacement") to explain how new species arise and why they differ from each other phenotypically. Darwin maintained that the origin of species and the evolution of differences between them is ultimately caused by divergent selection acting to minimize competitive interactions be...

1. Modern phylogenetic comparative biology uses data from the relationships between species (phylogeny) combined with comparative information for phenotypic traits to draw model-based statistical inferences about the evolutionary past. Recent years have seen phylogeny methods for evolutionary inference become central in the study of organic evolution. 2. Here, I present two different graphical ...