War and peace in phylogenetics: a rejoinder on total evidence and consensus

Abstract.-For more than 10 years, systematists have been debating the superiority of character or taxonomic congruence in phylogenetic analysis. In this paper, we demonstrate that the competing approaches can converge to the same solution when a consensus method that accounts for branch lengths is selected. Thus, we propose to use both methods in combination, as a way to corroborate the results of combined and separate analyses. We could engage in this debate by opting for character congruence, taxonomic congruence, or the conditional combination approach. Rather, we prefer to suggest using combined and separate analyses jointly, as proposed by de Queiroz (1993; see also Larson, 1994). Interestingly, a distance-based procedure relying on the average consensus has been applied successfully by Lapointe et al. (1999) to combine either trees or data matrices in a coherent fashion. This hybrid procedure is defined as a global congruence approach (see Lapointe, 1998b) because it assesses neither the congruence among characters nor that among individual phylogenies; rather, it evaluates the congruence between total evidence and consensus trees. This approach can thus be used to cross-corroborate the trees obtained by combined and separate analyses. In the present paper, we apply the socalled global congruence approach to a wide variety of published datasets sampled from the systematic literature, using a uniform 88