Relations and dependencies between morphological characters

Abstract

In biological classification, a character is a property of a taxon that can distinguish it from other taxa. Characters are not independent, and the relations between characters can arise from structural constraints, developmental pathways or functional constraints. That has lead to famous controversies in the history of biology. In addition, a character as a tool of data analysis has some subjective aspects. In this contribution, I develop algebraic and geometric schemes to address these issues in a mathematical framework.