Maximum Parsimony Advances for Native Phylogenetic Stemmatics

Abstract

In the field of textual criticism, scholars use stemmatics in order to recreate an extinct original text from a collection of extant copied texts. Stemmatic trees are used to represent the relationship between extant and hypothetical extinct texts. The relations between extant texts can be used to create a tree mapping out which texts descend from other texts. These trees are usually assessed for parsimony, which assumes that the simplest solution is most probable. For example, if a stemmatic tree relies on a large amount of hypothetical extinct documents relating the extant documents then it is less convincing. We have no evidence that these extinct documents even exist. Textual critics have used phylogenetic software to generate stemmatic trees. Phylogenetic software was designed to model the evolution of organisms.