Morphological systematics in the post-genomic era

Systematics is the study of characters distribution and evolution among species. Recent advances in molecular biology and genomics provide systematists with a tremendous amount of characters never previously attained by morphology alone. Despite its limitations, I argue here that morphology would continue to be fundamental to the systematic practice and that the genomic revolution would result in a renaissance in the conceptualization and homologization of morphological data. I will mainly focus on two taxonomic programs, namely DNA barcoding and phylogeny inference, and try to place morphological systematics within the broader frame of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.