The Invariant Nature of a Morphological Character and Character State: Insights from Gene Regulatory Networks

What constitutes a discrete morphological character versus character state has been long discussed in the systematics literature but the consensus on this issue is still missing. Different methods of classifying organismal features into characters and character states (CCSs) can dramatically affect the results of phylogenetic analyses. Here, I show that, in the framework of Markov models, the modular structure of the gene regulatory network...