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[[Systematics]] is the branch of [[biology]] that attempts to establish genealogical relationships among organisms. It is also concerned with their classification. There are three primary camps in systematics; cladists, pheneticists, and evolutionary taxonomists. The cladists hold that [[genealogy]] alone should determine classification and pheneticists contend that similarity over propinquity of descent is the determining criteria while evolutionary taxonomists claim that both genealogy and similarity count in classification.
It is among the cladists that Occam's razor is to be found. Although their term for it is cladistic parsimony. Cladistic parsimony(or [[maximum parsimony]]) is a method of phylogenetic inference in the construction of cladograms. Cladograms are branching tree like structures used to represent lines of descent based on one or more evolutionary change(s). Cladistic parsimony is used to support the hypothesis(es) that require the fewest evolutionary changes. It should be noted that for some types tree, it will consistantly produce the wrong results regardless of how much data is collected(This is called [[long-branch attraction]]). For a full treatment of cladistic parsimony see Elliott Sober's Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (1988). For a discussion of both uses of Occam's Razor in Biology see Elliott Sober's article ''Let's Razor Occam's Razor'' (1990).
==In medicine==
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