EXCESS HOMOPLASY RATIOS

Abstract Archie (1990) prefers his “homoplasy excess ratio” HER to Farris' (1989) ensemble retention index R. HER, he writes, lacks R's defects: R's minimum is not zero, and varies with number of terminals or characters. HER has those defects. Archie has misunderstood the permutation method on which HER rests, and mistaken the properties of R as well. After explaining those points, I describe other permutation‐based indices and briefly consider their utility. These provide relative measures of congruence among the characters of the data; one corresponds to a significance test. Copyright © 1991, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved