phyleticsn.
/fʌɪˈlɛtɪks/, U.S. /faɪˈlɛdɪks/ Biology.
The study of the relationships between biological species or other groups of organisms as resulting from evolutionary change and divergence; spec. an approach to systematics which aims to classify organisms on the basis of evolutionary relationships (contrasted with phenetics), but does not apply the strict principles of cladistics.
ΚΠ
1934 Amer. Midland Naturalist 15 648 [Cumings emphasized] the importance of a study of the development of [bryozoan] colonies..to take the place of embryology, so necessary in phyletics.
1970 Systematic Zool. 19 239 It is manifestly not true that supposedly theory-free phenetics boils down to the same thing as phyletics, which draws on the whole body of evolutionary theory, even though the latter depends of course on phenetic observations.
1996 Amer. Jrnl. Bot. 83 505/2 Cronquist dismissed the numerous chemical and anatomical similarities as examples of the ‘pervasive parallelism’ plaguing angiosperm phyletics.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, March 2006; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1934