THE SIXTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE WILLI HENNIG SOCIETY
Jonathan A. Coddington · Cladistics · 1987
The sixth annual meeting of the Willi Hennig Society convened November 7-10, 1986, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, under the joint sponsorship of the AMNH and the New York Botanical Garden.Roughly 220 people registered, and 41 talks were scheduled.As in the past, most of the meeting was allocated to symposia: Phylogenetic Packages for Microcomputers, Multistate Characters in Cladistic Analysis, Botanical Cladistics, and Primate Phylogeny.One day of contributed papers was scheduled.The symposium on cladistic software featured five speakers.Wayne Maddison ("Mac-Glade: A graphic and interactive program for analyzing character evolution . ..") introduced the next version of MacClade (2 .O, co-authored with David,Maddison), which runs only on Apple MacIntosh microcomputers.Unlike all other phylogenetic packages, his program is not designed primarily to find parsimonious trees (although it includes a local branch-swapping Wagner parsimony algorithm), but rather to enable the investigator to manipulate trees, and to investigate character evolution as constrained by a specified taxon cladogram.This program makes heavy use of the MacIntosh's screen-oriented, mouse-enabled mode of interaction.One can rearrange the cladogram at will, and the program automatically optimizes the data set on the new tree, and displays tree statistics (length, consistency index), the tree, and/or the data matrix in a variety of output styles.The program maps selected characters on the tree, and specifies ambiguous and unambiguous character states at nodes.The program currently handles a maximum of 80 taxa and 200 characters, 10-state integer characters, missing data, polymorphisms, and unordered, irreversible, or ordered (nonlinear as well as linear) character-state trees.As always, the logic of transformational hypotheses is still the user's responsibility.Plans are afoot to allow character-state trees that include closed loops (and hence provide more than one way to arrive at a given state), as well as asymmetrically weighted bidirectional changes on character-state trees.For all the people who tire of running analyses, watching them crash, re-running analyses, coding user-input trees, re-running analyses, mapping output back onto results, re-running analyses, re-coding transformations, re-running analyses, and generally exploring what some optimum actually impliesthis program is the first to address their needs efficiently.MacClade is the spreadsheet of phylogenetic packages: the cladogram provides the formula, and the bottom-line implications of a particular character, coding change, parsimony criterion, or branch swap, are instantly displayed.The MacIntosh's attention to graphic style means that results can be output directly to a laser printer. DavidSwofford ("PAUP: A computer program for phylogenetic analysis under parsimony'') talked about his new version (3.0) of micro PAUP.While the previous release of PAUP was a modified version of the mainframe program, the new version will be completely re-written.Both the old and the new version of PAUP are traditional phylogenetic packages, in that a chief purpose is to find shortest-length cladograms.