The Conundrum of Morphometrics

As a beginning, I offer a quotation from MacLeod(2002): “ The fundamental observation of biology is mor-phology. Morphological data form the basis of virtuallyall systematic descriptions” . That this is so is reinforcedby the fact that the vast majority of systematic studiesbegin by grouping organisms on the basis of morpholog-ical similarity. Once they are so grouped, we begin tostudy relationships among the groups, often by carefulexamination of variation in morphological features, butincreasingly more often by using these morphologically-defined groups as the basis for conducting studies ofmolecular variation.