Question

Cladistics is a way of clsssitying organisms by examining the chuaracteristics of their ancestors and descendants and depicting the relationships in a cladogram. Which of the following best describes a chalenge in classstying organisms this way?

Answer 1

One challenge is that surface characteristics can be misleading. One example is that fungi typically look more like plants than animals, but are more closely related to animals than plants. In addition, it can be difficult to determine whether similar characteristics are because of similar ancestry or similar environment. In short, determining relationships based on characteristics has a lot of room for error, and often must be used in conjunction with other methods to reach a conclusion with reasonable certainty.