Systematics: A Course of Lectures is designed for use in an
advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate level course in
systematics and is meant to present core systematic concepts and
literature. The book covers topics such as the history of
systematic thinking and fundamental concepts in the field including
species concepts, homology, and hypothesis testing. Analytical
methods are covered in detail with chapters devoted to sequence
alignment, optimality criteria, and methods such as distance,
parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches. Trees and
tree searching, consensus and super-tree methods, support measures,
and other relevant topics are each covered in their own sections.
The work is not a bleeding-edge statement or in-depth review of
the entirety of systematics, but covers the basics as broadly as
could be handled in a one semester course. Most chapters are
designed to be a single 1.5 hour class, with those on parsimony,
likelihood, posterior probability, and tree searching two classes
(2 x 1.5 hours).
About the author
Ward Wheeler is Professor in the Richard Gilder Graduate School and Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of several books, software packages, and over 100 technical papers in empirical and theoretical systematics.
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