what are the advantages and disadvantages of cladistics and phylogeny?

Question

anonymous · Answer

Cladistics is concerned with entire branchings. This way groups all the descendants from a common radiation into a clade as a related group and no others. The clades are monophyletic. 

Phylogeny is a way of tracking evolutionary relationships based on shared characters. Originally this used Linnaeus' artificially defined levels of taxonomy. This method allows convergent characters to be grouped despite their having followed a separate evolutionary path. Taxonomy is the rank levels while phylogeny is the path through the ranks. 

Cladistics is a way of grouping the related branches based on sharing derived characters within the group. However these characters are not found in other species except by convergence.