This document discusses new methods for measuring morphological disparity and evolutionary rates from cladistic-type matrices. It evaluates different distance metrics for calculating disparity from discrete morphological character data with missing values. Through simulations, it finds that Gower's distance performs best, retaining more taxa and variance while being more normally distributed and faithful to the original distances. It also addresses challenges in accurately calculating evolutionary rates from cladistic data and constructing time series analyses of disparity and rates.