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)
“Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)