KMS Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology
| Information in morphological characters | |
| Yu, Congyu1,2,3,4; Jiangzuo, Qigao1,5; Tschopp, Emanuel1,6; Wang, Haibing3,5; Norell, Mark1 | |
| 2021-08-04 | |
| 发表期刊 | ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
 |
| ISSN | 2045-7758 |
| 页码 | 11 |
| 通讯作者 | Yu, Congyu([email protected]) |
| 摘要 | The construction of morphological character matrices is central to paleontological systematic study, which extracts paleontological information from fossils. Although the word information has been repeatedly mentioned in a wide array of paleontological systematic studies, its meaning has rarely been clarified nor specifically defined. It is important, however, to establish a standard to measure paleontological information because fossils are hardly complete, rendering the recognition of homologous and homoplastic structures difficult. Here, based on information theory, we show the deep connections between paleontological systematic study and communication system engineering. Information is defined as the decrease of uncertainty and it is the information in morphological characters that allows distinguishing operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and reconstructing evolutionary history. We propose that concepts in communication system engineering such as source coding and channel coding, correspond to the construction of diagnostic features and the entire character matrices in paleontological studies. The two coding strategies should be distinguished following typical communication system engineering, because they serve dual purposes. With character matrices from six different vertebrate groups, we analyzed their information properties including source entropy, mutual information, and channel capacity. Estimation of channel capacity shows character saturation of all matrices in transmitting paleontological information, indicating that, due to the presence of noise, oversampling characters not only increases the burden in character scoring, but also may decrease quality of matrices. We further test the use of information entropy, which measures how informative a variable is, as a character weighting criterion in parsimony-based systematic studies. The results show high consistency with existing knowledge with both good resolution and interpretability. |
| 关键词 | character weighting information theory morphology systematics |
| DOI | 10.1002/ece3.7874 |
| 关键词[WOS] | PHYLOGENY |
| 收录类别 | SCI |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| WOS研究方向 | Environmental Sciences & Ecology ; Evolutionary Biology |
| WOS类目 | Ecology ; Evolutionary Biology |
| WOS记录号 | WOS:000680931000001 |
| 出版者 | WILEY |
| 引用统计 | |
| 文献类型 | 期刊论文 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.205/handle/311034/18195 |
| 专题 | 中科院古脊椎所（2000年以后） |
| 通讯作者 | Yu, Congyu |
| 作者单位 | 1.Amer Museum Nat Hist, Div Paleontol, New York, NY 10024 USA 2.Columbia Univ, Dept Earth & Environm Sci, New York, NY USA 3.Chinese Acad Sci, Inst Vertebrate Paleontol & Paleoanthropol, Key Lab Vertebrate Evolut & Human Origins, Beijing, Peoples R China 4.Peking Univ, Sch Earth & Space Sci, Key Lab Orogen Belts & Crustal Evolut, Beijing, Peoples R China 5.CAS Ctr Excellence Life & Paleoenvironm, Beijing, Peoples R China 6.Univ Hamburg, Ctr Nat Hist, Hamburg, Germany |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Yu, Congyu,Jiangzuo, Qigao,Tschopp, Emanuel,et al. Information in morphological characters[J]. ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION,2021:11. |
| APA | Yu, Congyu,Jiangzuo, Qigao,Tschopp, Emanuel,Wang, Haibing,&Norell, Mark.(2021).Information in morphological characters.ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION,11. |
| MLA | Yu, Congyu,et al."Information in morphological characters".ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION (2021):11. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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