Abstract— Because they are designed to produced just one tree, neighbor‐joining programs can obscure ambiguities in data. Ambiguities can be uncovered by resampling, but existing neighbor‐joining programs may give misleading bootstrap frequencies because they do not suppress zero‐length branches and/or are sensitive to the order of terminals in the data. A new procedure, parsimony jackknifing, overcomes these problems while running hundreds of times faster than existing programs for neighbor‐joining bootstrapping. For analysis of large matrices, parsimony jackknifing is hundreds of thousands of times faster than extensive branch‐swapping, yet is better able to screen out poorly‐supported groups.

Inapplicable character states occur when character com-characters, yet some mollusks lack salivary glands altogether. Thus, salivary gland characters should be uninplexes are absent or reduced in some of the taxa. Several approaches have been proposed for representing such formative in determining the placement of these animals, but may provide significant information for states in a character matrix so that the inapplicable condition has no effect on the placement of taxa and/or the classifying those with salivary glands. How can such characters be coded so that they do not affect the placeapplicable states are independent and not redundant. Here we examine each of these approaches and demonment of taxa that lack them but still provide information about the placement of those which do have strate that all have shortcomings. Coding inapplicables as "?" (reductive coding), although flawed, is currently the character? Furthermore, will the coding method violate fundamental properties of cladistic characters the best way to analyze data sets that contain inapplicable character states. ᭧ 1999 The Willi Hennig Society (such as non-redundancy, independence, etc.)? As we shall show, none of the existing methods is able to satisfy all of these criteria, and even the best method

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* The vision, ideas, observations and recommendations presented in this report are summarized from discussions by the participants during the 'Sustain What?' workshop held in New York in November 2010. The atmosphere was an example of creative collaboration at its best and the intellectual property herein belongs to the participants as a whole. Agreement with everything in the report by any single author should not be assumed as there was lively debate and disagreements over details. That said, most major points including, importantly, the feasibility of a 50-year species inventory were agreed to by all. The participants willingly set aside minor divergences of opinion in the interest of community-building and the creation of a powerful general vision for what can be.

Abstract— The order of states in a transformation series describes an internested set of synapomorphies. States adjacent to each other in the transformation series thus share a degree of homology not found in the other states. Whether the level of homology is relatively apomorphic is determined by rooting the order with outgroup comparison. The analysis of state order is a homology problem and is solved with a two‐step process using similarity and congruence with other characters as criteria. Other methods that have been proposed (e.g. transformation series analysis, non‐additive analysis, morphocline analysis, ontogenetic analysis) fail to apply both similarity and congruence, and thus cannot be used independently for determining character state order.