debate on the utility and appropriateness of character ordering, but no consensus. Some authorities order characters when there is a clear logical, ontogenetic, or evolutionary transition among the states (for example, "legs: short; medium; long"). Some accept only some of these criteria. Some run an unordered analysis, and order characters that show a clear order of transition in the resulting tree (which practice might be accused of circular reasoning). Some authorities refuse to order characters at all, suggesting that it biases an analysis to require evolutionary transitions to follow a particular path. It is also possible to apply differential weighting to individual characters. This is usually done relative to a "cost" of 1. Thus, some characters might be seen as more likely to reflect the true evolutionary relationships among taxa, and thus they might be weighted at a value 2 or more; changes in these characters would then count as two evolutionary "steps" rather than one when calculating tree scores (see below). There has been much discussion in the past about character weighting. Most authorities now weight all characters equally, although exceptions are common. For example, allele frequency data is sometimes pooled in bins and scored as an ordered character. In these cases, the character itself is often downweighted so that small changes in allele frequencies count less than major changes in other characters. Also, the third codon position in a coding nucleotide sequence is particularly labile, and is sometimes downweighted, or given a weight of 0, on the assumption that it is more likely to exhibit homoplasy. In some cases, repeated analyses are run, with characters reweighted in inverse proportion to the degree of homoplasy discovered in the previous analysis (termed successive weighting); this is another technique that might be considered circular reasoning. Character state changes can also be weighted individually. This is often done for nucleotide sequence data; it has been empirically determined that certain base changes (A-C, A-T, G-C, G-T, and the reverse changes) occur much less often than others (A-G, C-T, and their reverse changes). These changes are therefore often weighted more. As shown above in the discussion of character ordering, ordered characters can be thought of as a form of character state weighting. Some systematists prefer to exclude characters known to be, or suspected to be, highly homoplastic or that have a large number of unknown entries ("?"). As noted below, theoretical and simulation work