What's the difference between a cladogram and a phylogenetic tree?

Both phenetics (classical phylogeny) and cladistics can be used for either morphological or molecular analyses. Phenetics measures degrees of similarity. Cladistics traces the sharing of derived characters. Cladistics needs to define some ancestral state (usually a sister taxon) to which your samples are compared. For example, if the ancestral state has an A at some nucleotide position and some of your samples have a G at this position, it is assumed that those sharing the G have inherited this change from the same source and so are related to each other by descent. Of course you need to look at many characters to determine who is related to whom. In phenetics, you do not need to determine what is ancestral and what is a shared derived character. You only care about who appears most similar to whom at one point in time. Cladistics is generally considered to be more reliable for the determination of evolutionary relatedness. Hope this helps.wbla3335
Coral