Editing Cladistics (section)

== In disciplines other than biology ==
The comparisons used to acquire data on which [[cladograms]] can be based are not limited to the field of biology.<ref>{{Harvnb|Mace|Clare|Shennan|2005|p=1}}</ref> Any group of individuals or classes that are hypothesized to have a common ancestor, and to which a set of common characteristics may or may not apply, can be compared pairwise. Cladograms can be used to depict the hypothetical descent relationships within groups of items in many different academic realms. The only requirement is that the items have characteristics that can be identified and measured.

[[Cultural anthropology|Anthropology]] and [[archaeology]]:<ref>{{Harvnb|Lipo|O'Brien|Collard|Shennan|2006}}</ref> Cladistic methods have been used to reconstruct the development of cultures or artifacts using groups of cultural traits or artifact features.

[[Comparative mythology]] and [[Folklore|folktale]] use cladistic methods to reconstruct the protoversion of many myths. Mythological phylogenies constructed with mythemes clearly support low horizontal transmissions (borrowings), historical (sometimes Palaeolithic) diffusions and punctuated evolution.<ref>d'Huy 2012a, b; d'Huy 2013a, b, c, d</ref> They also are a powerful way to test hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales.<ref>Ross and al. 2013</ref><ref>Tehrani 2013</ref>

[[Literature]]: Cladistic methods have been used in the classification of the surviving manuscripts of the ''[[Canterbury Tales]]'',<ref>{{cite web|title=Canterbury Tales Project |url=http://www.canterburytalesproject.org |access-date=2009-07-04 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090707103441/http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/ |archive-date=7 July 2009 }}</ref> and the manuscripts of the Sanskrit ''[[Charaka Samhita]]''.<ref name="Maas 2010">{{Harvnb|Maas|2010–2011}}</ref>

[[Historical linguistics]]:<ref>{{Harvnb|Oppenheimer|2006|pp=290–300, 340–56}}</ref> Cladistic methods have been used to reconstruct the phylogeny of languages using linguistic features. This is similar to the traditional [[comparative method (linguistics)|comparative method]] of historical linguistics, but is more explicit in its use of [[Occam's razor|parsimony]] and allows much faster analysis of large datasets ([[computational phylogenetics]]).

[[Textual criticism]] or [[stemmatics]]:<ref name="Maas 2010" /><ref>{{Harvnb|Robinson|O'Hara|1996}}</ref> Cladistic methods have been used to reconstruct the phylogeny of manuscripts of the same work (and reconstruct the lost original) using distinctive copying errors as apomorphies. This differs from traditional historical-comparative linguistics in enabling the editor to evaluate and place in genetic relationship large groups of manuscripts with large numbers of variants that would be impossible to handle manually. It also enables [[Maximum parsimony (phylogenetics)|parsimony]] analysis of contaminated traditions of transmission that would be impossible to evaluate manually in a reasonable period of time.

[[Astrophysics]]<ref>{{Harvnb|Fraix-Burnet|Choler|Douzery|Verhamme|2006}}</ref> infers the history of relationships between galaxies to create branching diagram hypotheses of galaxy diversification.