What is parsimony? The parsimony principle is basic to all science and tells us to choose the simplest scientific explanation that fits the evidence. In terms of tree-building, that means that, all other things being equal, the best hypothesis is the …

One reliable method of building and evaluating trees, called parsimony, involves grouping taxa together in ways that minimize the number of evolutionary changes that had to have occurred in the characters.

In phylogenetics and computational phylogenetics, maximum parsimony is an optimality criterion under which the phylogenetic tree that minimizes the total number of character-state changes (or minimizes the cost of differentially weighted character-state changes).

In this review, we summarize common methods for constructing phylogenetic trees, including distance methods, maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, Bayesian inference, and tree-integration methods (supermatrix and supertree).

A phylogenetic tree sorts organisms into clades or groups of organisms that descended from a single ancestor using maximum parsimony.

The parsimony principle is basic to all science and tells us to choose the simplest scientific explanation that fits the evidence. In terms of tree-building, that means that the best hypothesis is the one that requires the fewest evolutionary changes.

The basic idea of parsimony is to seek a tree, or a collection of trees that minimizes the amount of evolutionary change (or transformations of one character state into another) required to explain the data. We can also say that the parsimony criterion favors hypotheses that maximize congruence and minimize homoplasy.

Parsimony is preference for the least complex explanation. Under maximum parsimony, the preferred phylogenetic tree is the tree that requires the smallest number of evolutionary changes.

The parsimony principle, often referred to as Occam's razor, is a guiding concept in constructing phylogenetic trees that suggests the simplest explanation, or the one that requires the least number of evolutionary changes, is usually the correct one.

Maximum parsimony (MP) is a popular technique for phylogeny reconstruction. However, MP is often crit-icized as being a statistically unsound method and one that fails to make explicit an underlying ‘‘model’’ of evolution.