Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Of or relating to a group of taxa that includes the common ancestor of all the members but not all descendants of that ancestor.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective systematics Said of a defined group constrained within a clade without including all descendants of the most common ancestor.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From para- ("near"), Ancient Greek φῦλον (phulon, "tribe, race"), and -ic.

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  • In phylogenetics, a group of organisms is said to be paraphyletic (Greek para = near and phyle = race) if the group contains its most recent common ancestor, but does not contain all the descendants of that ancestor.

    _Wikipedia

    February 19, 2008

  • The concept "paraphyletic" terms everything except the cladistic confusion of "now" and "then", that is, everything EXCEPT the inconsistent cladistic belief that history can be described unambiguously. It thus terms everything that is not cladistic, that is, everything that does not rest on cladistics' erroneous axiom that classes are real (i.e., typology). It is a generic term for what the ancient Greeks called "barbarians" in their differentiation of "Greeks" and "barbarians" (thus also including aryans in their version of cladistics). It terms a generic denial of everything except cladistics, especially of objectivity (which empirical science rests on). It does, fundamentally, represent a claim that all achievements of empirical science, including Einstein's theory of the relativity of time, is wrong ("unnatural") - that empirical science has got everything up-side-down. It actually represents a revolution against empirical science (i.e., objectivity) resting on the erroneous axiom that classes are real. It is thus, fundamentally, a typological concept of "non-cladistic". Accepting it thus turns you into a cladist. (Fact is that both "para"- and "holophyletic" are "monophyletic" (per definition), and that we have no practical possibility to tell them apart. The cladistic distinction of them can never become anything else than a brain-ghost).

    May 1, 2011