Culture jamming

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming 

Culture jamming (sometimes also guerrilla communication) is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of mass society.

Culture jamming employs techniques originally associated with Letterist International, and later Situationist International known as détournement. It uses the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions that produce that culture. Tactics include editing company logos to critique the respective companies, products, or concepts they represent, or wearing fashion statements that criticize the current fashion trends by deliberately clashing with them. Culture jamming often entails using mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, commonly using the original medium's communication method. Culture jamming is also a form of subvertising.

Culture jamming aims to highlight and challenge the political assumptions underlying commercial culture, and argues that culture jamming is a response to socially imposed conformity. Prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the Billboard Liberation Front and contemporary artists such as Ron English. Culture jamming may involve street parties and protests. While culture jamming usually focuses on subverting or critiquing political and advertising messages, some proponents focus on a different form which brings together artists, designers, scholars, and activists to create works that transcend the status quo rather than merely criticize it. In addition to these political and cultural aims, researchers have noted that the pleasure involved in culture jamming plays an important role in sustaining participation. Analysts argue that fun can link individual acts of subversion to a broader, imagined protest community, helping disparate actions feel part of a shared project. This affective style both draws on and resists the dominant emotion regime of late capitalism, making emotional engagement not only a tactic but also an end in itself.

Origins of the term, etymology, and history

The term was coined by Don Joyce of American sound collage band Negativland, with the release of their album JamCon '84. The phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming, where public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies used by governments. In one of the tracks of the album, Joyce stated:

As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard... directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.

According to Vince Carducci, although the term was coined by Negativland, the practice of culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord. The SI asserted that in the past, humans dealt with life and the consumer market directly. They argued that this spontaneous way of life was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new "modern" way of life. Situationists saw everything from television to radio as a threat and argued that life in industrialized areas, driven by capitalist forces, had become monotonous, sterile, gloomy, linear, and productivity-driven. In particular, the SI argued humans had become passive recipients of the spectacle, a simulated reality that generates the desire to consume, and positions humans as obedient consumerist cogs within the efficient and exploitative productivity loop of capitalism. Through playful activity, individuals could create situations, the opposite of spectacles. For the SI, these situations took the form of the dérive, or the active drift of the body through space in ways that broke routine and overcame boundaries, creating situations by exiting habit and entering new interactive possibilities.

The cultural critic Mark Dery traces the origins of culture jamming to medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted, in Rabelais and His World and other writings, as an officially sanctioned inversion of the social hierarchy. Modern precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of 1960s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, Joey Skaggs, the German concept of Spaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1950s and 1960s. The SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication within mass media to sow confusion within the dominant culture. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed to expose discrimination and corruption in the art world.

Dery's 1990 New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax" was the first mainstream media mention of the phenomenon; Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs, a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical, sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to date. Adbusters, a Canadian publication espousing an environmentalist critique of consumerism and advertising, began promoting aspects of culture jamming after Dery introduced founder and editor Kalle Lasn to the term through a series of articles he wrote for the magazine. In her critique of consumerism, No Logo, the Canadian cultural commentator and political activist Naomi Klein examines culture jamming in a chapter that focuses on the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada. Through an analysis of the Where the Hell is Matt viral videos, researchers Milstein and Pulos analyze how the power of the culture jam to disrupt the status quo is currently being threatened by increasing commercial incorporation. For example, T-Mobile utilized the Liverpool street underground station to host a flashmob to sell their mobile services.

Tactics

Graffitied text on billboard in Cambridge, UK

Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions of viewers and bystanders. Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement. Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme to pull on the emotional strings of people and evoke some type of reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change. Culture jamming also intersects with forms of legal transgression. Semiotic disobedience, for example, involves both authorial and proprietary disobedience, while techniques such as coercive disobedience comprise acts of culture jamming combined with a demonstration of the retaliatory actions (legal consequences) handed down by the ruling apparatus.

One of the earliest American culture jammers, Joey Skaggs began staging elaborate media hoaxes in the 1960s as a form of social critique and performance art. His satirical projects, including the Cathouse for Dogs (a fictitious brothel for canines) and the Comacocoon (a fake sensory-deprivation vacation therapy), targeted institutional authority and exposed the media's susceptibility to sensationalism. Skaggs' interventions are regarded as foundational to the development of culture jamming as a strategy for media activism and public discourse.

The basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme. Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others. The term meme was coined and first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins, but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff, who claimed memes were a type of media virus. Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate themselves or mutate upon transmission, just like a virus.

Culture jammers will often use common symbols such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense. In one example, jammer Jonah Peretti used the Nike symbol to stir debate on sweatshop child labor and consumer freedom. Peretti made public exchanges between himself and Nike over a disagreement. Peretti had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike refused. Once this story was made public, it spread worldwide and contributed to the already robust conversation about Nike's use of sweatshops, which had been ongoing for a decade prior to Peretti's 2001 stunt.

Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples of cultural jamming like Peretti's are more along the lines of tactics that radical consumer social movements would use. These movements push people to question the taken-for-granted assumption that consuming is natural and good and aim to disrupt the naturalization of consumer culture; they also seek to create systems of production and consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate late capitalism.

Past mass events and ideas have included Buy Nothing Day, virtual sit-ins and protests over the Internet, producing ‘subvertisements' and placing them in public spaces, and creating and enacting ‘place jamming' projects where public spaces are reclaimed and nature is re-introduced into urban places.

The most effective form of jamming is to use an already widely recognizable meme to transmit the message. Once viewers are forced to take a second look at the mimicked popular meme they are forced out of their comfort zone. Viewers are presented with another way to view the meme and are forced to think about the implications presented by the jammer. More often than not, when this is used as a tactic the jammer is going for shock value. For example, to make consumers aware of the negative body image that big-name fashion brands are frequently accused of causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's 'Obsession' was created and played worldwide. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder throwing up into a toilet.

Another way that social consumer movements hope to utilize culture jamming effectively is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image but does so in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination. An example would be the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters. "True cost" forced consumers to compare the human labor cost and conditions and environmental drawbacks of products to the sales costs. Another example would be the "Truth" campaigns that exposed the deception tobacco companies used to sell their products.

Following critical scholars like Paulo Freire, culture jams are also being integrated into the university classroom setting, "in which students and teachers gain the opportunity not only to learn methods of informed public critique but also to collaboratively use participatory communication techniques to actively create new locations of meaning." For example, students disrupt public space to bring attention to community concerns or utilize subvertisements to engage with media literacy projects.

Examples

Main article: List of culture jamming organizations and people

• Artivist
• Billboard hacking
• Broadcast signal intrusion
• Flash mob
• Happening
• Practical joke topics
• Steal This Album!
• Steal This Book

Groups

• Billboard Liberation Front
• Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions
• Crimethinc
• Guerrilla Girls
• Merry Pranksters
• monochrom
• Operation Mindfuck
• The Yes Men
• Youth International Party

Criticism

Some scholars and activists, such as Amory Starr and Joseph D. Rumbo, have argued that culture jamming is futile because it is easily co-opted and commodified by the market, which tends to "defuse" its potential for consumer resistance. A newer understanding of the term has been called for that would encourage artists, scholars and activists to come together and create innovative, flexible, and practical mobile art pieces that communicate intellectual and political concepts and new strategies and actions.

Cladistics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics

Cladistics (/kləˈdɪstɪks/ klə-DIST-iks; from Ancient Greek κλάδος kládos 'branch') is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups ("clades") based on hypotheses of most recent common ancestry. The evidence for hypothesized relationships is typically shared derived characteristics (synapomorphies) that are not present in more distant groups and ancestors. However, from an empirical perspective, common ancestors are inferences based on a cladistic hypothesis of relationships of taxa whose character states can be observed. Theoretically, a last common ancestor and all its descendants constitute a (minimal) clade. Importantly, all descendants stay in their overarching ancestral clade. For example, if the terms worms or fishes were used within a strict cladistic framework, these terms would include humans. Many of these terms are normally used paraphyletically, outside of cladistics, e.g. as a 'grade', which are fruitless to precisely delineate, especially when including extinct species. Radiation results in the generation of new subclades by bifurcation, but in practice sexual hybridization may blur very closely related groupings.

As a hypothesis, a clade can be rejected only if some groupings were explicitly excluded. It may then be found that the excluded group did actually descend from the last common ancestor of the group, and thus emerged within the group. ("Evolved from" is misleading, because in cladistics all descendants stay in the ancestral group). To keep only valid clades, upon finding that the group is paraphyletic this way, either such excluded groups should be granted to the clade, or the group should be abolished.

Branches down to the divergence to the next significant (e.g. extant) sister are considered stem-groupings of the clade, but in principle each level stands on its own, to be assigned a unique name. For a fully bifurcated tree, adding a group to a tree also adds an additional (named) clade, and a new level on that branch. Specifically, also extinct groups are always put on a side-branch, not distinguishing whether an actual ancestor of other groupings was found.

The techniques and nomenclature of cladistics have been applied to disciplines other than biology. (See phylogenetic nomenclature.)

Cladistics findings are posing a difficulty for taxonomy, where the rank and (genus-)naming of established groupings may turn out to be inconsistent.

Cladistics is now the most commonly used method to classify organisms.

History

Willi Hennig 1972

Peter Chalmers Mitchell in 1920

Robert John Tillyard

The original methods used in cladistic analysis and the school of taxonomy derived from the work of the German entomologist Willi Hennig, who referred to it as phylogenetic systematics (also the title of his 1966 book); but the terms "cladistics" and "clade" were popularized by other researchers. Cladistics in the original sense refers to a particular set of methods used in phylogenetic analysis, although it is now sometimes used to refer to the whole field.

What is now called the cladistic method appeared as early as 1901 with a work by Peter Chalmers Mitchell for birds and subsequently by Robert John Tillyard (for insects) in 1921, and W. Zimmermann (for plants) in 1943. The term "clade" was introduced in 1958 by Julian Huxley after having been coined by Lucien Cuénot in 1940, "cladogenesis" in 1958, "cladistic" by Arthur Cain and Harrison in 1960, "cladist" (for an adherent of Hennig's school) by Ernst Mayr in 1965, and "cladistics" in 1966. Hennig referred to his own approach as "phylogenetic systematics". From the time of his original formulation until the end of the 1970s, cladistics competed as an analytical and philosophical approach to systematics with phenetics and so-called evolutionary taxonomy. Phenetics was championed at this time by the numerical taxonomists Peter Sneath and Robert Sokal, and evolutionary taxonomy by Ernst Mayr.

Originally conceived, if only in essence, by Willi Hennig in a book published in 1950, cladistics did not flourish until its translation into English in 1966 (Lewin 1997). Today, cladistics is the most popular method for inferring phylogenetic trees from morphological data.

In the 1990s, the development of effective polymerase chain reaction techniques allowed the application of cladistic methods to biochemical and molecular genetic traits of organisms, vastly expanding the amount of data available for phylogenetics. At the same time, cladistics rapidly became popular in evolutionary biology, because computers made it possible to process large quantities of data about organisms and their characteristics.

Methodology

Main articles: Phylogenetics and Cladogram

See also: Phylogenetic tree

The cladistic method interprets each shared character state transformation as a potential piece of evidence for grouping. Synapomorphies (shared, derived character states) are viewed as evidence of grouping, while symplesiomorphies (shared ancestral character states) are not. The outcome of a cladistic analysis is a cladogram – a tree-shaped diagram (dendrogram) that is interpreted to represent the best hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships. Although traditionally such cladograms were generated largely on the basis of morphological characters and originally calculated by hand, genetic sequencing data and computational phylogenetics are now commonly used in phylogenetic analyses, and the parsimony criterion has been abandoned by many phylogeneticists in favor of more "sophisticated" but less parsimonious evolutionary models of character state transformation. Cladists contend that these models are unjustified because there is no evidence that they recover more "true" or "correct" results from actual empirical data sets

Every cladogram is based on a particular dataset analyzed with a particular method. Datasets are tables consisting of molecular, morphological, ethological and/or other characters and a list of operational taxonomic units (OTUs), which may be genes, individuals, populations, species, or larger taxa that are presumed to be monophyletic and therefore to form, all together, one large clade; phylogenetic analysis infers the branching pattern within that clade. Different datasets and different methods, not to mention violations of the mentioned assumptions, often result in different cladograms. Only scientific investigation can show which is more likely to be correct.

Until recently, for example, cladograms like the following have generally been accepted as accurate representations of the ancestral relations among turtles, lizards, crocodilians, and birds:

▼	Testudines turtles Diapsida ♦ Lepidosauria lizards Archosauria Crocodylomorpha crocodilians Dinosauria birds

If this phylogenetic hypothesis is correct, then the last common ancestor of turtles and birds, at the branch near the ▼ lived earlier than the last common ancestor of lizards and birds, near the ♦. Most molecular evidence, however, produces cladograms more like this:

Diapsida ♦	Lepidosauria lizards Archosauromorpha▼ Testudines turtles Archosauria Crocodylomorpha crocodilians Dinosauria birds

If this is accurate, then the last common ancestor of turtles and birds lived later than the last common ancestor of lizards and birds. Since the cladograms show two mutually exclusive hypotheses to describe the evolutionary history, at most one of them is correct.

Cladogram of the primates, showing a monophyletic taxon (a clade: the simians or Anthropoidea, in yellow), a paraphyletic taxon (the prosimians, in blue, including the red patch), and a polyphyletic taxon (the nocturnal primates – the lorises and the tarsiers – in red)

The cladogram to the right represents the current universally accepted hypothesis that all primates, including strepsirrhines like the lemurs and lorises, had a common ancestor all of whose descendants are or were primates, and so form a clade; the name Primates is therefore recognized for this clade. Within the primates, all anthropoids (monkeys, apes, and humans) are hypothesized to have had a common ancestor all of whose descendants are or were anthropoids, so they form the clade called Anthropoidea. The "prosimians", on the other hand, form a paraphyletic taxon. The name Prosimii is not used in phylogenetic nomenclature, which names only clades; the "prosimians" are instead divided between the clades Strepsirhini and Haplorhini, where the latter contains Tarsiiformes and Anthropoidea.

Lemurs and tarsiers may have looked closely related to humans, in the sense of being close on the evolutionary tree to humans. However, from the perspective of a tarsier, humans and lemurs would have looked close, in the exact same sense. Cladistics forces a neutral perspective, treating all branches (extant or extinct) in the same manner. It also forces one to try to make statements, and honestly take into account findings, about the exact historic relationships between the groups.

Terminology for character states

The following terms, coined by Hennig, are used to identify shared or distinct character states among groups:

• A plesiomorphy ("close form") or ancestral state is a character state that a taxon has retained from its ancestors. When two or more taxa that are not nested within each other share a plesiomorphy, it is a symplesiomorphy (from syn-, "together"). Symplesiomorphies do not mean that the taxa that exhibit that character state are necessarily closely related. For example, Reptilia is traditionally characterized by (among other things) being cold-blooded (i.e., not maintaining a constant high body temperature), whereas birds are warm-blooded. Since cold-bloodedness is a plesiomorphy, inherited from the common ancestor of traditional reptiles and birds, and thus a symplesiomorphy of turtles, snakes and crocodiles (among others), it does not mean that turtles, snakes and crocodiles form a clade that excludes the birds.
• An apomorphy ("separate form") or derived state is an innovation. It can thus be used to diagnose a clade – or even to help define a clade name in phylogenetic nomenclature. Features that are derived in individual taxa (a single species or a group that is represented by a single terminal in a given phylogenetic analysis) are called autapomorphies (from auto-, "self"). Autapomorphies express nothing about relationships among groups; clades are identified (or defined) by synapomorphies (from syn-, "together"). For example, the possession of digits that are homologous with those of Homo sapiens is a synapomorphy within the vertebrates. The tetrapods can be singled out as consisting of the first vertebrate with such digits homologous to those of Homo sapiens together with all descendants of this vertebrate (an apomorphy-based phylogenetic definition). Importantly, snakes and other tetrapods that do not have digits are nonetheless tetrapods: other characters, such as amniotic eggs and diapsid skulls, indicate that they descended from ancestors that possessed digits which are homologous with ours.
• A character state is homoplastic or "an instance of homoplasy" if it is shared by two or more organisms but is absent from their common ancestor or from a later ancestor in the lineage leading to one of the organisms. It is therefore inferred to have evolved by convergence or reversal. Both mammals and birds are able to maintain a high constant body temperature (i.e., they are warm-blooded). However, the accepted cladogram explaining their significant features indicates that their common ancestor is in a group lacking this character state, so the state must have evolved independently in the two clades. Warm-bloodedness is separately a synapomorphy of mammals (or a larger clade) and of birds (or a larger clade), but it is not a synapomorphy of any group including both these clades. Hennig's Auxiliary Principle states that shared character states should be considered evidence of grouping unless they are contradicted by the weight of other evidence; thus, homoplasy of some feature among members of a group may only be inferred after a phylogenetic hypothesis for that group has been established.

The terms plesiomorphy and apomorphy are relative; their application depends on the position of a group within a tree. For example, when trying to decide whether the tetrapods form a clade, an important question is whether having four limbs is a synapomorphy of the earliest taxa to be included within Tetrapoda: did all the earliest members of the Tetrapoda inherit four limbs from a common ancestor, whereas all other vertebrates did not, or at least not homologously? By contrast, for a group within the tetrapods, such as birds, having four limbs is a plesiomorphy. Using these two terms allows a greater precision in the discussion of homology, in particular allowing clear expression of the hierarchical relationships among different homologous features.

It can be difficult to decide whether a character state is in fact the same and thus can be classified as a synapomorphy, which may identify a monophyletic group, or whether it only appears to be the same and is thus a homoplasy, which cannot identify such a group. There is a danger of circular reasoning: assumptions about the shape of a phylogenetic tree are used to justify decisions about character states, which are then used as evidence for the shape of the tree. Phylogenetics uses various forms of parsimony to decide such questions; the conclusions reached often depend on the dataset and the methods. Such is the nature of empirical science, and for this reason, most cladists refer to their cladograms as hypotheses of relationship. Cladograms that are supported by a large number and variety of different kinds of characters are viewed as more robust than those based on more limited evidence.

Terminology for taxa

Mono-, para- and polyphyletic taxa can be understood based on the shape of the tree (as done above), as well as based on their character states. These are compared in the table below.

Term	Node-based definition	Character-based definition
Holophyly, Monophyly	A clade, a monophyletic taxon, is a taxon that consists of the last common ancestor and all its descendants.	A clade is characterized by one or more apomorphies: derived character states present in the first member of the taxon, inherited by its descendants (unless secondarily lost), and not inherited by any other taxa.
Paraphyly	A paraphyletic assemblage is one that is constructed by taking a clade and removing one or more smaller clades. (Removing one clade produces a singly paraphyletic assemblage, removing two produces a doubly paraphyletic assemblage, and so on.)	A paraphyletic assemblage is characterized by one or more plesiomorphies: character states inherited from ancestors but not present in all of their descendants. As a consequence, a paraphyletic assemblage is truncated, in that it excludes one or more clades from an otherwise monophyletic taxon. An alternative name is evolutionary grade, referring to an ancestral character state within the group. While paraphyletic assemblages are popular among paleontologists and evolutionary taxonomists, cladists do not recognize paraphyletic assemblages as having any formal information content – they are merely parts of clades.
Polyphyly	A polyphyletic assemblage is one which is neither monophyletic nor paraphyletic.	A polyphyletic assemblage is characterized by one or more homoplasies: character states which have converged or reverted so as to be the same but which have not been inherited from a common ancestor. No systematist recognizes polyphyletic assemblages as taxonomically meaningful entities, although ecologists sometimes consider them meaningful labels for functional participants in ecological communities (e. g., primary producers, detritivores, etc.).

Criticism

Cladistics, either generally or in specific applications, has been criticized from its beginnings. Decisions as to whether particular character states are homologous, a precondition of their being synapomorphies, have been challenged as involving circular reasoning and subjective judgements. Of course, the potential unreliability of evidence is a problem for any systematic method, or for that matter, for any empirical scientific endeavor at all.

Transformed cladistics arose in the late 1970s  in an attempt to resolve some of these problems by removing a priori assumptions about phylogeny from cladistic analysis, but it has remained unpopular.

Issues

Ancestors

The cladistic method does not identify fossil species as actual ancestors of a clade. Instead, fossil taxa are identified as belonging to separate extinct branches. While a fossil species could be the actual ancestor of a clade, there is no way to know that. Therefore, a more conservative hypothesis is that the fossil taxon is related to other fossil and extant taxa, as implied by the pattern of shared apomorphic features.

Extinction status

An otherwise extinct group with any extant descendants, is not considered (literally) extinct, and for instance does not have a date of extinction.

Hybridization, interbreeding

Due to hybridization, it can be difficult to delineate the two last common ancestors of a given species Many species are capable of interbreeding for millions of years, during which many branches may have radiated and bred with species from earlier branches of the same grouping. The process of true cladistic bifurcation can thus take extended effort as branchings become more complex. In practice, for recent radiations, cladistically guided findings only give a coarse impression of the complexity. A more detailed account will give details about fractions of introgressions between groupings, and even geographic variations thereof. This has been used as an argument for the use of paraphyletic groupings,.

Horizontal gene transfer

Horizontal gene transfer is the mobility of genetic info between different organisms that can have immediate or delayed effects for the reciprocal host. There are several processes in nature which can cause horizontal gene transfer. This does typically not directly interfere with ancestry of the organism, but can complicate the determination of that ancestry. On another level, one can map the horizontal gene transfer processes, by determining the phylogeny of the individual genes using cladistics.

Naming stability

If there is unclarity in mutual relationships, there are a lot of possible trees. Assigning names to each possible clade may not be prudent. Furthermore, established names are discarded in cladistics, or alternatively carry connotations which may no longer hold, such as when additional groups are found to have emerged in them. Naming changes are the direct result of changes in the recognition of mutual relationships, which often is still in flux, especially for extinct species. Hanging on to older naming and/or connotations is counter-productive, as they typically do not reflect actual mutual relationships precisely at all. E.g. Archaea, Asgard archaea, protists, slime molds, worms, invertebrata, fishes, reptilia, monkeys, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo erectus all contain Homo sapiens cladistically, in their sensu lato meaning. For originally extinct stem groups, sensu lato generally means generously keeping previously included groups, which then may come to include even living species. A pruned sensu stricto meaning is often adopted instead, but the group would need to be restricted to a single branch on the stem. Other branches then get their own name and level. This is commensurate to the fact that more senior stem branches are in fact closer related to the resulting group than the more basal stem branches; that those stem branches only may have lived for a short time does not affect that assessment in cladistics.

In disciplines other than biology

The comparisons used to acquire data on which cladograms can be based are not limited to the field of biology. Any group of individuals or classes that are hypothesized to have a common ancestor, and to which a set of common characteristics may or may not apply, can be compared pairwise. Cladograms can be used to depict the hypothetical descent relationships within groups of items in many different academic realms. The only requirement is that the items have characteristics that can be identified and measured.

Anthropology and archaeology: Cladistic methods have been used to reconstruct the development of cultures or artifacts using groups of cultural traits or artifact features.

Comparative mythology and folktale use cladistic methods to reconstruct the protoversion of many myths. Mythological phylogenies constructed with mythemes clearly support low horizontal transmissions (borrowings), historical (sometimes Palaeolithic) diffusions and punctuated evolution. They also are a powerful way to test hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales.

Literature: Cladistic methods have been used in the classification of the surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, and the manuscripts of the Sanskrit Charaka Samhita.

Historical linguistics: Cladistic methods have been used to reconstruct the phylogeny of languages using linguistic features. This is similar to the traditional comparative method of historical linguistics, but is more explicit in its use of parsimony and allows much faster analysis of large datasets (computational phylogenetics).

Textual criticism or stemmatics: Cladistic methods have been used to reconstruct the phylogeny of manuscripts of the same work (and reconstruct the lost original) using distinctive copying errors as apomorphies. This differs from traditional historical-comparative linguistics in enabling the editor to evaluate and place in genetic relationship large groups of manuscripts with large numbers of variants that would be impossible to handle manually. It also enables parsimony analysis of contaminated traditions of transmission that would be impossible to evaluate manually in a reasonable period of time.

Astrophysics infers the history of relationships between galaxies to create branching diagram hypotheses of galaxy diversification.