Andrew, Do you know the underlying distribution of your measures? Are they things which have a normal distribution? I tried many ways to quantify variability, but each method has its limitation. You need to manufacture some data and subject it to different kinds of variability measures to start to understand what the problems are. You could go to Van Valen, 1978; Soule 1971; and Gilmartin et al, 1986 as a starting place and if if there is anything new that references these.
Gilmartin, Dobrowolski, Soltis, Kellogg and Harris. 1986. Variability within and among populations of four grass species. Syst. Bot. 11(4):559-566. Van Valen. 1978. The Statistics of Variation. Evolutionary Theory. 4:33-43. Soule. 1971. The variation problem: the gene-flow variation hypothesis. Taxon 20(1):37-50 If there is anything I can help you with, let me know. I did a lot of thinking about this problem but I didn't come up with any good answers. Patricia ([EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) Dear Morphometricians: I am a taxonomist working on a revision of a genus with about 80 species of plants (palms). I have a data matrix with measures of about 20 variables, taken from herbarium specimens. Some species are obviously much more variable than others. What I want is a single measure of variability of each species. What is this? Thanks. Andrew Henderson -- Replies will be sent to the list. For more information visit http://www.morphometrics.org <http://www.morphometrics.org> -- Replies will be sent to the list. For more information visit http://www.morphometrics.org
