Definition, Meaning & Synonyms | English word PARSIMONY

Definitions of PARSIMONY

1. Great reluctance to spend money unnecessarily.
2. (by extension) The quality or characteristic of using the fewest resources or explanations to solve a problem.

Examples of Using PARSIMONY in a Sentence

• In the philosophy of science, there are two concepts referring to two aspects of simplicity: elegance (syntactic simplicity), which means the number and complexity of hypotheses, and parsimony (ontological simplicity), which is the number and complexity of things postulated.
• Lingen was at all events a most successful resister of importunate claims, and his undoubted talents as a financier were most prominently displayed in the direction of parsimony.
• They include the following: absence of contradictions, absence of ambivalence, abstractness, generality, precision, parsimony, and conditionality.
• Although traditionally such cladograms were generated largely on the basis of morphological characteristics calculated by hand, genetic sequencing data and computational phylogenetics are now commonly used and the parsimony criterion has been abandoned by many phylogeneticists in favor of more "sophisticated" (but less parsimonious) evolutionary models of character state transformation.
• For example, the evolution and repeated loss of teeth in vertebrates could be well-modeled under Dollo parsimony, whereby teeth made from hydroxyapatite evolved only once at the origin of vertebrates, and were then lost multiple times, in birds, turtles, and seahorses, among others.
• Ockham's Razor followed in 1984, with Williams introducing a leading scientist or personality who then expounds from a prepared text on a topic of their choice, with a view to making a subject simple and accessible to the public, hence the title relating to the famous statement on parsimony by William of Ockham.
• This result had only weak maximum parsimony jackknife support, but in a phylogenomic study in 2015, it received strong maximum likelihood bootstrap support.
• 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).
• Bonaparte was a traditionalist and did not use modern cladistic methods, which apply the principle of parsimony to a vast array of synapomorphies.
• Centuries later, this parsimony and neglect was belatedly remedied by depositing the surviving registers in county record offices where they were better safeguarded, conserved, and made accessible mostly on microfilm as that technology became available.
• The field of cladistics (defined in the strictest sense) favor the use of the maximum parsimony criterion for phylogenetic inference.
• User Interface researchers have performed experiments suggesting that minimalism, as illustrated by the design principles of parsimony and transparency, bolsters efficiency and learnability.
• Methods for estimating phylogenies include neighbor-joining, maximum parsimony (also simply referred to as parsimony), unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA), Bayesian phylogenetic inference, maximum likelihood, and distance matrix methods.
• Under maximum parsimony, an ancestral state reconstruction for this clade reveals that "hummingbird" is the most parsimonious ancestral state for the lower clade (plants D, E, F), that the ancestral states for the nodes in the top clade (plants A, B, C) are equivocal and that both "hummingbird" or "bee" pollinators are equally plausible for the pollination state at the root of the phylogeny.
• Ten years after his previous expedition, with his high-minded enthusiasm once again enabling him to overcome the indifference and parsimony of Government authorities and employees, he sailed down the Marañón River to Iquitos in record time to show how it was possible to defend the region.
• MacPhee and Horovitz tested this alternative phylogeny with extensive anatomical comparisons and by extending their parsimony analysis using PAUP*.
• The city authorities reap the dire consequences of their parsimony in military matters and their waffling approach to alliances, while the city as a whole draws divine punishment for the pride and worldliness of the "swilling Epicures" dwelling within it.
• Unfortunately, they displayed the same parsimony to the navy, allowing the independent admiralties to sell off a large part of the fleet that had defeated the second Spanish Armada so resoundingly in neutral English waters in the Battle of the Downs of 1639.
• The parsimony analyses revealed that aneuploid reduction (n=5 to 4) and polyploidy (n=5 to 10) have evolved at least twice in the genus, whereas the obligately submersed growth habit and hypohydrophily have evolved once.
• Using the principle of the phylogeographic parsimony, the resolution of the E-M215 trifurcation in favor of a common ancestor of E-M2 and E-M329 strongly supports the hypothesis that haplogroup E-P2 originated in eastern Africa, as previously suggested, and that chromosomes E-M2, so frequently observed in sub-Saharan Africa, trace their descent to a common ancestor present in eastern Africa.

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