Parsimony and explanatory power

Abstract

Abstract Parsimony can be related to explanatory power, either by noting that each additional requirement for a separate origin of a feature reduces the number of observed similarities that can be explained as inheritance from a common ancestor; or else by applying Popper’s formula for explanatory power together with the fact that parsimony yields maximum likelihood trees under No Common Mechanism (NCM). Despite deceptive claims made by some likelihoodists, most maximum likelihood methods cannot be justified in this way because they rely on unrealistic background assumptions. These facts have been disputed on the various grounds that ad hoc hypotheses of homoplasy are explanatory, that they are not explanatory, that character states are ontological individuals, that character data do not comprise evidence, that unrealistic theories can be used as background knowledge, that NCM is unrealistic, and that likelihoods cannot be used to evaluate explanatory power. None of these objections is even remotely well founded, and indeed most of them do not even seem to have been meant seriously, having instead been put forward merely to obstruct the development of phylogenetic methods. © The Willi Hennig Society 2008.

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