Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun In a cladogram, a point from which two or more new branches diverge, representing either of two cases.
- noun A multiple speciation event in which two or more species diverge from the same ancestor.
- noun A speciation event in which two or more species are presumed to descend from the same ancestor, but the order of speciation is unknown.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Division into more than two parts: distinguished from
dichotomy .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Logic) A division into many members.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun taxonomy A section of a
phylogeny in which the evolutionary relationships can not be fully resolved todichotomies
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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In a phylogenetic tree, a polytomy is represented as a node which has more than two immediate descending branches.
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Wrong - a polytomy is not that cladistics can only have two branches from any particular node.
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This is called a polytomy, as opposed to a dichotomy.
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This is called a polytomy, as opposed to a dichotomy.
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But anyway this (polytomy) proves my point that cladistics assumes common ancestry by way of shared characteristics
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ID guy: But anyway this (polytomy) proves my point that cladistics assumes common ancestry by way of shared characteristics
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Polytomy: A polytomy (also called a polychotomy) is a section of a phylogeny in which the evolutionary relationships can not be fully resolved to dichotomies.
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In nomenclatorial terms, the taxa in a soft polytomy belong to a clade, but are 'incertae sedis' within that clade.
PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Hubert Turner et al. 2010
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Y. padellus and Y. cagnagellus as a clade in a polytomy with our
PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Hubert Turner et al. 2010
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The only polytomy on the majority-rule consensus tree is an almost basal one between
PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Hubert Turner et al. 2010
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