Method
While the method has its greatest value when extant species are used for bracketing, the method itself does not not require that both bracketing groups have extant members, nor that the species or group to be bracketed is extinct. The only real requisite is that the two bracketing species/groups be better known, with regard to the trait in question, than the species to be bracketed is.
Read more about this topic: Phylogenetic Bracketing
Famous quotes containing the word method:
“As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“You that do search for every purling spring
Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flows,
And every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows
Near thereabouts into your poesy wring;
You that do dictionary’s method bring
Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows;”
—Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
“We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)