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ON THE PRESENT REVOLUTION Richard
H. Zander Though this be
madness, yet there is method in't. It is certainly not
the least charm of a theory that it is refutable. False facts are
highly injurious to the progress of science, An enthusiast
sways humanity by...dinning it into our ears that this SUMMARY |
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Scientific explanations are accepted
consensually as they explain observed facts in an elegant, explicit manner
with the proviso that they continue to be of value predictively as new data
arrives. Cladistics has apparently succeeded in explaining complexly
associated facts elegantly and explicitly, and apparently predicts similar
results with different data. This essay examines cladistics in the light of
scientific modeling, and presents a general perspective for the cladists'
demonization of New Systematics and taxonomy in general. THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Positivists have put forward the
concept of a purely factual science, without presuppositions. The
"transformed" school of cladism modified this viewpoint to promote
a pure methodological science (Scott-Ram, 1990). Regarding scientific
revolutionaries, "Once science is viewed as a matter of
straightforwardly building theory from fact..., it may seem to make sense to
imagine a presuppositionless science and pejoratively to label those tenets
that are no longer deemed factual as 'metaphysical presuppositions'"
(Hatfield, 1990), i.e. unnecessary, biased, restrictive first principles. On
the other hand, other schools of cladism have a distinct metaphysics,
evolution being "a central tenet from which the principles and methods
of taxonomy are to be deduced" (de Queiroz, 1992). Assuming that
assumptions, paradigms and theory are unnecessary for the advance of
knowledge is the called Baconian fallacy (Fisher 1970: 4). Postmodern distain
for science as a problem-solver is incorporated into our everyday lives. For
instance, the rhetoric is full-blown in the mouth of a fuzzy chaoticist
character in best-seller POSTMODERNISM Truth, as given by the supposedly
failed modernists, is said to be historically deliberately constructed as the
great "meta-narratives" of western culture, these including
Science, Christianity, Democracy, Communism, and Progress. Such constructions
require exposure as self-perpetuating, aggrandizing shams, systems that
commit acts of cultural tyranny by promoting the fiction that all knowledge
may be reduced to an absolute, unified, rational system. In the field of
textual criticism (e.g. hermeneutics, the rule-based science of
interpretation) deconstruction of works, paragraphs, phrases and names
reveals imbedded connotations that signify hidden presumptions of ideologies
and cultural biases. "...With the collapse of the modern 'metanarrative'
of reality, science is sustained by the 'performability' of theories, their
ability to generate more scientific work" (Lyotard, 1986: 46). According
to Golinski (1990), an understanding of scientific discourse in the era of
the Scientific Revolution "requires attention not merely to the language
of that discourse but also to the political functions of language in
expressing and mediating social relations." The postmodernist is committed to
modes of thought that emphasize fragmentations, discontinuities and
incommensurable aspects of any given intellectual system. Certainly most of
us would agree with Barzun (1958: 360) that equality is "a concept for
dealing out justice among incommensurable human beings." The postmodern
result of this emphasis would be a "Rediscovery of Man" (C. Smith,
1975). Kuhn (1970: 198), a postmodern philosopher of science, considers
revolutionary paradigm shifts in science a human reaction to communications
breakdowns because of relative incommensurability of theories and
experimental and observational positions. Words mean something different to
different generations of scientists. Without "translation," a
supplanting naturally follows. Kuhn recommends "going native" and
learning that new foreign language but warns that the learner will at some
point slip completely into that language. There is no middle ground,
according to Kuhn, no real building of theory upon theory. The postmodernist ideology requires
"self-referencing" in that the ideas of the artist or writer should
always be self-conscious and should not assume, as modernists are apparently
wont to do, cultural homogeneity on the part of the viewers or readers.
Definitions and discussions of postmodernism are admittedly various and may
be found, e.g., in Jary and Jary (1991), Wynne-Davies (1990), and O'Sullivan
& al. (1994). Major writers in a vast literature include Friedrich
Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles
Deleuze (see Piercy, 1995). There is much to value in the
writings of the some postmodernist thinkers, and deconstructionist methods
are, of course, attractive to the literary critic, but postmodernist
observations are often merely bandied about "playfully" and are not
intended to be placed in the marketplace of ideas. It would be valuable, for
instance, to engage in discourse leading to some consensus on solutions to
the problem of protecting electronic publication of scientific papers in an
chaotic cyberspace where attribution is quickly lost, but postmodernists
simply reject this concern as the "cult of originality": the idea
that everything we write, say or think is a pastiche or "cut-ups"
of previous persons' efforts; intellectual autonomy is a mere fantasy (cf.
Eliot & Cantsin, 1996), while we all live in an artificial reality of
layers of meaning, connotations, signs and symbols where computerized virtual
reality is actually a relief from illusion, being consciously
self-referencing; "our notion of the natural and the real is really a
highly political construction, a product of history..." (Woolley, 1992).
Even in science, "each viewpoint creates its own reality"
(Scheffler, 1982: 19 in a critique of Kuhn). The darling of postmodernism, F.
Nietzsche, "rediscovered and restated the romanticist relativity of all
knowledge, the futility of applying scientific cause and effect to life, and
the primacy of faith" (Barzun, 1958: 305). "All universals
accessible to the finite being are necessarily, in the words of Nietzsche,
fictions--acts of mind. But without them we could not continue the game. Play
is life itself, says Derrida" (Merrell 1985: 136). Perhaps
cyber-oriented postmodernists may arrive at a workable solution to the
problems of electronic publication of scientific information in an age of
chaos and complexity; one cannot dismiss enthusiasts out of hand. There are,
however, many critics of postmodernism, e.g. Neville (1992); Norris (1990),
at least in those areas of discourse that may be reached by reason. Kuhn (1970: 193), in an influential
work, pointed out that, because seeing is "theory-laden" and words
mean different things to different people, scientists "in some sense
live in different worlds" and each is "isolated in their own
systems of meanings as well as within his own universe of observed
things" (Sheffler, 1982: 16) and to that extent they cannot judge one
theory as superior to the other, an entirely postmodern viewpoint; this
incommensurability leads to abrupt, major paradigm shifts--scientific
revolutions. Many systematists have experienced postmodernist arguments and
world views, though probably not recognizing these as such. Some of us have
puzzled over recent books that announce an end to Science (e.g. Horgan,
1996). Science, apparently, has been negated because quantum mechanics has
shown that reality is composed of contradictory truths, indeterminacy, and
action at a distance, which "support the notion that reality is brought
into existence and maintained by the action of consciousness" ( Gerald Holton (1995), in a celebrated
ringing damnation of postmodernism in science, warned that "today's
version of the Romantic Rebellion, while strong in other fields, represents
still only a seductive minority view among analysts and science policy
makers, coming not up from the grass roots but down from the treetops.
However, while it is held among prominent persons who can indeed influence
the direction of a cultural shift, the scientists at large, and especially the
scientific establishment, have chosen to respond so far merely with quiet
acquiescence. If those trends should continue, and the self-designated
postmodernists rise to controlling force, the new sensibility in the era to
come will be very different indeed from the recently dominant one."
Raloff (1996) quotes Holton as saying that "a 1992 draft of the new
National Science Education Standards announced that they would be 'based on
the post-modernist view'--one that questions the objectivity of observation and
the truth of scientific knowledge.'" Though this was happily excised,
the published National Science Education Standards (National Research
Council, 1996: 201) now explains that "science is not separate from
society but rather science is a part of society," covering itself,
however, by adding that science is not based on "personal beliefs,
religious values, mystical inspiration, superstition, or authority"
though these may have "personal value." It is the thesis of this writer that
cladism--the ideology, and cladistics--the method, share many features with
postmodernism and have in fact a common ancestry with that same movement, as
have other recent "revolutions" in the physical sciences, including
virtual reality, fuzzy logic and chaos theory. Cladistic partisans denigrate
New Systematics in much the same way as those of postmodernism deprecate
scientism, to wit, that both are authoritarian nonsense. What unites the
revolutionary thrust of postmodernism with its scientific aspects is
intensive use of the computer: postmodernists have discovered that it
provides instant democracy (Terdeman, 1996), while scientists find it
essential in dealing with complexity, including virtual modeling, fuzzy
neural networks, strange attractors, and parsimony algorithms. Complexity is
the new preoccupation of cutting-edge science (Gell-Man, 1995).
Postmodernism, however, fuels the scientific revolutionaries in formalizing
the deconstruction of past theory. Curiously, most of the facies of
revolution listed above have their emblems: postmodernism has the muted
cornet symbol common in Thomas Pynchon's fiction, virtual reality has its
glove, chaos theory has the owl's eyes of the Edward Lorenz attractor, and
cladistics has the branching tree (fuzzy logic's emblem is unclear). Ashworth
(1990) echoed a postmodern preoccupation in pointing out that "The
emblematic world view is...the single most important factor in determining
late Renaissance attitudes towards the natural world... Every kind of thing
in the cosmos has myriad hidden meanings and that knowledge consists of an
attempt to comprehend as many of these as possible." According to
Ashworth, this is not a Medieval outlook, but something more evolved; it
ended in the mid-1600's with a "decontextualization" of the world,
a "desymbolization of nature," a sudden death of "animal
semantics" (Ashworth, 1990). To post-modernists, this time was a
catastrophe of knowing when words were separated from things, both nature and
words suddenly lacked hidden meanings, and scientists became cautious about
imposing patterns on nature. DECONSTRUCTION The metanarrative is a particular focus
of postmodernist ire; in the case of cladism, the New Systematics is found
particularly evil. According to Simpson (1953), the term was first used by
Hubbs (1934), and is a reaction to idealism and typology; what modern
systematists of this school "classify is not a specimen but a population
or series of populations existing in nature, of which the specimens are
samples. The characteristics of a population are those of all its
members collectively with all their resemblances and differences. Such a population
has an average condition, but it has no single, crystallized, idealized
pattern or morphotype." This was not a revolution in itself (Mayr, 1980:
43) but is a synthesis (Huxley, 1940) of taxonomic thought prevalent between
1920 and the present in which taxonomy was encouraged to reflect the results
of studies in population biology, genetics, anatomy, ecology, cytology, etc.
Macroevolutionary theory was minimized and the phrase "adaptive
landscape" (Wright, 1932) was a shibboleth: species and supraspecies
concepts, phylogeny and classification were to be determined by hypothesized
evolutionary scenarios associated with adaptive zones, niches and major
radiation (Simpson, 1953: 156). The cladist has abandoned the second,
theoretical aspect of the "dual nature of evolutionary change"
(Mayr, 1976: 448). Eldredge and Cracraft (1980: 312) wrote, deconstructively,
that "the expression 'adaptive radiation' is itself a value-laden
description, hinting at the causes underlying the particular pattern."
Stuessy (1990) has attempted to bring the syncretic method up to date as the
New Phyletics, maximizing numerical contributions from cladistic, patristic
and phenetic study in an effort to be more explicit and to some extent
minimize theory. But being only partly numerical, with no defined single
procedure or methodology, taxonomies generated under the New Systematics (or
population systematics) never achieved classifications with the fine
resolution and coherent methodological justification of the cladograms of evolutionary
relationships based on the Hennig's synapomorphy criterion. The numerical
taxonomists Sokal and Sneath (1973) were harsh: "...the New Systematics
contributed little to our understanding of the nature and evolution of the
higher categories and of taxonomic structure in general. Books...[they
include Hennig, 1966] deal with the latter topics but they contain little
more than descriptive generalizations." Yet the field of phenetics,
championed by Sokal and Sneath is now in the doghouse. Clearly, it is not
only theory, the wondrous paladin of progress, that is now considered
counter-revolutionary. It is clear, to this writer at least,
that scientists use intuition and induction to generate hypotheses, and use a
loose form of the hypotheticodeductive method (as discussed by McMullin,
1990) to find support for theories, as when manifold results of experiment or
multiple observations agree with theory and successful exact predictions can
be made. Karl Popper's (1965) special form of the latter method, involving
complete rejection of induction and the restriction of the testing of a
hypothesis exclusively to its empirical consequences gives a kind of
philosophical credence to those who reject theorization in context of the New
Systematics, no matter what experimental evidence that theory is based on.
This is a kind of narrow operationism that enhances the chance of overlooking
internal invalidity (Neale & Liebert, 1973). As Chesterton (1956: 156)
solved the problem for his fellow True Believers, "true premises produce
a true conclusion. What is called induction seems simply to mean collecting a
larger number of true premises.... What is pompously called induction is
simply collecting more of the data," and scientists know "that
their conclusions would not be true unless their premises are true.... But in
the final process of truth there is nothing else except a good
syllogism"; much of induction is simply wishing, according to this
religious apologist. Building on facts is good science, and building on theory
is problematic, but good theory built on facts can guide science. To the
extent that the New Systematics is built on facts, basing classification on
such theory is defensible. Surely restricting evolutionary studies to an
algorithm is reprehensibly simplistic. Hedberg (1995, 1996) expressed well an
apprehension that cladistics makes assumptions that are not met with in the
real world. Wiley (1981: 138) lamented the low
resolving power of theoretical definitions of homology as a dilemma that
"is the direct result of the exclusive use of induction in framing
hypotheses of homology and hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships.... The
'problem of homology' does not exist, however, if we admit phylogenetic
relationships based on other characters as a major criterion in the
hypotheticodeductive mode of hypothesis testing." Hennig (1966)
presented series of logical deductions as a scheme of argumentation leading
to a correct phylogenetic tree. Wiley, as others, ducked the problem of
probability that any hypothesis is correct by referring to the fact that
"the one true phylogeny for any given set of organisms will never be
known" while at the same time restricting testing to "the
congruence or incongruence of a particular hypothesis of synapomorphy with
other hypotheses of synapomorphy in an open system of the testing of
competing phylogenetic hypotheses." Popperian refutation of a hypothesis
is limited to parsimony, i.e. a shorter tree. Eldredge and Cracraft (1980: 248)
discussed at length that "nearly all attempts by synthesists to deal
with macroevolution, at least until recently, fail even to mention species,
much less to incorporate hypotheses pertaining to species into the
analysis" pointing out that principles based on a well-corroborated
within-population phenomenon (fitness differentials of natural selection) are
applied wholesale across the taxonomic hierarchy, there being "no
necessary relationship between natural selection and speciation, at least in
terms of allopatric speciation." Whether they are right or not, the
drubbing that New Systematics has received is most significant as an
extravagant gesture of political polarization designed to highlight the new
method of cladistics. Comparing pre-Hennigian systematics
with cladistics is comparing a straw dog to a bloodhound. According to Crowe
(1994), "the New Systematics...was riddled with subjective approaches,
e.g. arbitrary a priori character weighting and models of evolutionary
process, which could be used to distort phylogenetic hypotheses almost at
will by invoking preferred adaptational models or evolutionary just-so
stories." Postmodernists would agree: "the writer's most effective
weapons against [the silence imposed by expertise and complexity] have always
been simplicity and common sense" (Saul, 1992: 7). Cladistics, of
course, does not say genetics, population biology, cytology, etc. are not
valuable fields of study, just that there is no relevance of these fields to
uncovering phylogenetic relationships. In this total rejection, a
"fact-proof shield" protects the True Believer (Hoffer, 1951). This
is protection from the uncomfortable fact that the bloodhound of cladistics
finds trees bearing characters at the ends of branches not taxa. The "just-so stories"
(Kipling, 1966--"How the Leopard Got His Spots" etc.) referred to
by Crowe (1994) above and in the Hennig Society Homepage are the baleful
metanarratives of the "theory laden" New Systematics. Neo-Darwinism
and the modern synthesis are not all bad, having been shown to be strong in
some respects and shaky in others by modern writers (e.g. K. Smith, 1992).
Besides, according to the historian Fisher (1970:131) "All scientists
use story schemas some of the time...." The above ridicule may be seem
justified, however, by what appear to be the striking results of cladistics.
The Process Structuralists "paint neo-Darwinism in the blackest terms
without offering anything very concrete as an alternative" (K. Smith,
1992), but cladistics appears to provide a major new way of approaching
evolutionary analysis. In fact, the astoundingly high resolution of the
parsimony method cannot be fully generalized to a modeling of ancestors, and
we are actually all in the situation of struggling to infer on the basis of
poor data "how the leopard got his spots." Postmodernists have criticized
Kepler's astronomy because it came out of his medieval religious views,
Darwin's evolution because it was motivated by his desire to perpetuate his
privileged social class, and Newton's rejection of Descartes' philosophy
because it might challenge conventional religion (Sagan, 1995). Similar ad
hominum or otherwise off-center accusations about New Systematics or
pre-Hennigian taxonomy in general abound in the cladistic literature; Crowe
(1994), for instance, complained that limited funds for systematics research
should not be spent on "attempts to impose underlying and unjustifiable
process assumptions to historical phenomena," these being "much to
do about nothing." Clearly purveyors of traditional taxonomy, as
postmodernists feel is the case with all scientists, sustain their funding
with nonsense. There has not been an attempt at a real comparison of
scientific value between the taxonomic results of New Systematics and
cladistics; there should be and it should not be judged circularly. SELF-REFERENCING The Hennig Society summary goes on to
say that: "Cladistics produces hypotheses about the relationships of
organisms in a way that, unlike other systems, predicts properties of the
organisms." And what are these other non-predictive systems? The
Homepage provides the following headings in its Education section: "The
Paradiso Tour: what is cladistics? The Purgatorio Tour: other so-called
phylogenetic methods. The Inferno Tour: phenetics, synthetics and related
sins." The demonization of other methods and fields of study militates
against consilience--the support of other methods of investigation, through
which reasoned discourse promotes a general consensus on what are scientific
facts (cf. Hull, 1983: 184). One might ignore the implications of
the Hennig Society Homepage, attributing its excesses in cladistic propaganda
to youthful exuberance or to something akin to the teleological explanations
we all sometimes indulge in--but for the fact that cladistics is flawed, and
its practitioners are now generating students. Unlike Lysenkoism, cladistics
is based on a definite advance. Compare a cladogram, for all its problems,
with Simpson's (1953: 387) uncomfortable concept of an evolutionary or
phyletic species that transforms from one species over time into another,
anagenetically, crossing at some point an arbitrary boundary; this does not
seem useful even in paleontology even if "the early and the late forms
differ as much as species usually do, and if taxonomy is to be significant
and useful they must be distinguished." The Hennigian algorithm really
does reflect a Darwinian evolutionary theory of simple relationships and has
considerable resolving power given phylogenetically informative data. It is
the unskeptical emphasis on the straight Hennigian method and that method
alone that makes cladism an ideology, and it is the modeling of hypothetical
ancestors on the basis of insufficient evidence (character distribution on a
cladogram) that makes the cladogram no ultimate solution. To the extent that
one stands on one's own shoulders, one finds one's head in a narrow place. Promoting polarization helps define
and enliven a political or ideological movement; any resistance empowers the
new ideas. Many of the self-referencing and deconstructionist faults of
cladism noted above have been pointed out before but not in the context of
their common origin in a widespread and robust Romantic rebellion against
19th and 20th Century Enlightenment values, billed by partisans as a genuine
"paradigm shift" happening in most fields of science and art.
Although rebellion and rejection are characteristic of this shift, modern
systematists should eschew participating in a polarizing reaction because a
useful classification based at least in part on an evolutionary framework
requires both Apollonian syncretism and Nietzschian methodological fervor. PROCEDURALISM That cladistics have long been of
interest to postmodernists for use in textual criticism (reciprocal
illumination" is much like the "hermeneutic circle" according
to M. Schmitt, darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu) and linguistics (Platnick &
Cameron, 1977; Discussion Group PMC-Talk, 1992) is not in itself problematic.
But, important to systematists, the cladistic method is much the same as
Rawlsian proceduralism. Richard Rorty (1991), the neopragmatist, has
explained J. Rawls' (1971, 1985) method as follows: "Rawls thinks that
'Philosophy as the search for truth about an independent metaphysical and
moral order cannot...provide a workable and shared basis for a political
conception of justice in a democratic society.' So he suggests that we
confine ourselves to collecting 'such settled convictions as the belief in
religious toleration and the rejection of slavery' and then 'try to organize
the basic intuitive ideas and principles implicit into a coherent conception
of justice.'" Rorty indicated that one cannot free oneself from history
and tradition by an appeal to Nature or Reason. In that we are all different,
we should abandon Enlightenment values, such as making everyone accept some
global moral objective. We should just stay in our moral clubs and come out
only to "haggle" with others, otherwise ignoring people unlike
ourselves culturally. Rawlsian procedural justice will suffice for all
problems. Rawls' proceduralism hits
uncomfortably home in its pragmatic reflection in systematics today; I
suggest scientists read "scientific" for "moral" or
"cultural" above. The proper, required proceduralism of systematics
is, according to cladists, a judgmental paradigm involving a simple,
generally agreed upon version of evolution (much like Darwin's own idealized
concept as opposed to "overall similarity" fide Stuessy, 1990: 57). THE OBSCURE AND MYSTIFYING Examples of hubris in the
revolutionary literature are many. According to the cladist Brooks (1981),
"the only necessary and sufficient criterion for recognizing that evolution
has occurred is the discovery of synapomorphies." "Cladistics are
the analytical process by which phylogenetic histories are inferred"
(Snow, 1996). According to the fuzzy logician Kosko (1993): "One day I
learned that science was not true... They [scientists] said that all things
were true or false..." but "All facts were matters of degree."
The virtual realist Woolley (1992) wrote: "Science only admits into its
canon those theories that can be rejected by it [!]" therefore self-centeredly
refusing to investigating astrology, aromapathy, divination, ESP and
telekinesis, while he fratricidically decried "postmodern autism"
because virtual realists such as himself are "upbeat and
forward-looking." Gleick (1987: 3, 38, 39) described chaos theory:
"...Chaos has become a shorthand name for a fast growing movement that
is reshaping the fabric of the scientific establishment" and "chaos
has become not just theory but also a method, not just a canon of beliefs but
also a way of doing science.... To chaos researchers, mathematics has become
an experimental science, with the computer replacing laboratories full of
test tubes and microscopes," also "Stylistically, early chaos
papers recollect the Benjamin Franklin era in the way they went back to first
principles...." also "Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One
account of nature replaces another." Gleick quoted Joseph Ford:
"Evolution is chaos with feedback." Like cladists, chaoticists
reject theory in favor of the simplicity and commonsense of their synthetic
system: "Natural selection operates not on genes and enzymes but on the
final product. So an adaptationist explanation for the shape of an organism
or the function of an organ always looks to its cause, not its
physical cause but its final cause. Final cause survives in science wherever
Darwinian thinking has become habitual... It became a rich and fruitful
problem to explain a leaf in terms of how natural selection shaped such an
effective solar panel [but] leaves come in just a few shapes, of all the
shapes imaginable; and the shape of a leaf is not dictated by its
function" (Gleick, 1987: 201). These neo-romantic monomethodical
systems are actually only incremental or at most situational alternative
advances hidden behind a buzz of appeals to an irrational, ideological
revolution involving cant about paradigm shifts. Polly (1993) agreed with
Hull (1988) that "science is a process more like evolution than
revolution... The synthesis view of [G. G.] Simpson was the product of more
than sixty years of experimentation in portraying evolution in classification
after 1859. It is equally the product of historical precedent, advances in
scientific method, individual influence, and chance. The current cladistic
'revolution' has been grinding on for more than thirty years at this point
and has had a similar history...." Mayr (1976), in a thorough criticism
of cladistics, puzzled over "no hope for a meeting of minds" while
at the same time being largely dismissed as a contributor to evolutionary
systematics by Eldredge (1982) in the introduction to the reprinted edition.
Writing of Darwinian, Marxian and Wagnerian "revolutions," Barzun
(1958: 323) concluded their "form was System, a clear claim to the title
of ism. From each of these isms the public learned that the riddle of
the Sphinx had been solved, but that the solution was somewhat technical and
intricate; a new language was to be mastered, whose universal use would
revolutionize the world. Yet at bottom lay a simple principle [for each
system]." As Morison (1979) has pointed out, as the wheel of history
turns, ironically "the current tendency of those with high scores in
quantitative studies to dismiss the literary arts as "trivial" is
simply a distant echo from the masters of the medieval quadrivium similarly
derisive of the merely verbal studies of the trivium." The syncretic struggle to find a more
complex analytical approach that matches a more complex, global understanding
of nature is found to be anathema (a "sin," above) by cladist
partisans. This is not a minor point. The paradigm shift is supposedly upon
us; enthusiastic new doctorates trained in cladistics are now replacing
syncretic taxonomists. Cladist zealots are now recommending major changes in
the rules of nomenclature to better reflect classifications based solely on
parsimony analysis. Mickevich (1983) unambiguously equated classification
theory with cladogenesis. As it turns out, the International Code of
Botanical Nomenclature (as well as its faunal counterpart) is an internally
consistent (e.g. the burden of autonyms!) and supposedly scientific procedure
with an associated vast cryptic literature that desperately needs
streamlining and reality-testing. On the other hand, a completely new code would
serve only to fix cladogenesis as the only way to group taxa. Because nodes
on cladograms are not completely generalizable as ancestral species, and thus
cladograms actually have far less resolution than they are presented as
having, the phylogenetic relationships of a large proportion of taxa cannot
be established in any detail. [See also my recent critique of statistical
phylogenetics: Zander 2001.] The old ranking system works fine for the
groupings of the hierarchical results of cladistics and remains of value
precisely because it is old and well-entrenched. We, as taxonomists, have a
duty to make the present Code less legalistic and more accessible by the
uninitiated (e.g. Names in Current Use and the proposed Biocode--Greuter,
1996; Greuter & al., 1996), or a revolutionary with an axe to grind will
do it for us. Postmodernism shares with New Age
partisans some disconcerting attitudes about objective truth: "if an
experience seems real, it is real" (Schick & Vaughn, 1995). The
monomethodical quick fix to intransigent problems in science (virtual
reality, fuzzy logic, chaos, parsimony analysis) is quite similar to the
isolated, circular, irrational cultural artifact (like language, mores,
rituals and fashions) that must be respected by self-referencing
postmodernists. To many of us when first confronted with cladistics, it
seemed magical the way nicely resolved cladograms of phylogenetic
relationships could be generated from large, complex data sets. A. C. Clarke
is credited with the observation that "a sufficiently advanced science
is indistinguishable from magic." The reverse is also true. CLADISTICS AND FINE STRUCTURE The cladogram inspires respect
because of its apparent high resolution of evolutionary relationships,
especially when a fully resolved cladogram is presented. A series of problems
having to do with evolutionary theory as over-simplified in cladistics are
reviewed by various authors (e.g. Felsenstein, 1978, 1983; Stuessy, 1990:
126-128; Zander, 1993), but these papers alike suggest no numerical solution,
no attractive alternative to the elegant cladistic method. Saether (1986) pointed out that
because parallel changes often exceed unparallel changes in the real world,
much outside information and theory in addition to the parsimony analysis is
required for analysis below the family level. He reiterated Hennig's (1966)
insistence on the importance of intuition and subjective evaluation in
systematics, and concluded his treatment of convergence with the observation
that objectivity in parsimony analysis is a myth. Apropos of this, Medawar
(1984) ably defends intuition in science. In a study using artificial
phylogenies mimicking actual morphological data sets, Lamboy (1994) found that
maximum parsimony is poor at finding the true phylogenetic tree: "for
simulated data sets having values of the consistency index in the range
reported in the literature, maximum parsimony found the true phylogenetic
tree only from 0.7% to 27.8% of the time...." and he cautioned against
"using phylogenies reconstructed from morphological data to make
inferences about biological processes or patterns..." because of the
apparent high frequency of multiple character state changes per speciation
event, parallelisms, reversals, extinctions and phyletic changes. Convergence
may also easily obtain by chance alone as discussed by Armbruster (1992), or
genetic polymorphism persisting through speciation events, producing
identical morphological variants at places on the tree (discussion by
Felsenstein, 1983). Mayr (1976) noted rightly that Hennig was incorrect in
his claim that determining whether a particular character state is present in
a stem species will distinguish between corresponding character states in several
related species as synapomorphies, convergences, homologies, or parallelisms;
actually only apomorphy as against the other three are decided. The autapomorphies of the terminal
taxa will become the synapomorphies of their derived taxa; so modeling is
enabled to the degree to which parsimony analysis constructs ancestral nodes
with their autapomorphies retained as synapomorphies. If, on the other hand,
the average number of autapomorphies of the terminal taxa subtending a node
is more than the number of synapomorphies at that node, then the algorithm
becomes top heavy with inferences from too few characters (fallacy of false
interpolation, which requires full information to avoid, Fischer, 1970: 122).
In practice (Zander, in ms) one might expect about half the nodes of the
cladogram to actually model ancestral species. Cladograms therefore usually
do not completely model phylogenetic trees. I submit that, while cladists may
feel the systematic bottle is finally nearly full, and others that it is
emptying fast, that the bottle is about half full. The probability that a
cladistic solution is correct is determined solely by how well the selected
terminal taxa retain phylogenetic information, while the shortest tree
maximizes possible synapomorphies as possible solutions. Nodes lacking a
number of synapomorphies equal to the average number of autapomorphies of
that branch must collapse. Requiring generalizable models of ancestors
indicates that much of the highly resolved fine structure of most published
cladograms is altogether too sanguine and logically insupportable. Plank (1949) remarked that there
exist phantom problems that are insoluble, either because no
indisputable method of solution exists or because the question is
unreasonable, and that one should ascertain at the outset whether the problem
is genuine and a solution expected. Mayr (1976: 431) was of the opinion that
"the idea of one ideal natural system is a phantom." It is probable
that much information about phylogenetic relationships is lost and that many
potential shared ancestors may never be modeled on firm data. NEW SYSTEMATICS DA CAPO The New Systematics emphasized
grouping by as many characters as possible, often polythetically, and usually
resulted in only a comparatively few, poorly resolved groups of
hypothetically related taxa; while cladistics usually presents a highly resolved
nested series of related groups, but these groupings are often based on few
characters compared to those possessed by real taxa. It is this
ungeneralizable fine structure that is logically objectionable because of
problems with convergence associated with high autapomorphy to synapomorphy
ratios. A return to a dissatisfaction with "one-character taxonomy"
(in groups for which one character differentiation is seldom taxonomically
sufficient) seems warranted. Taxonomy is, however, seldom acknowledged by
cladists as a worthwhile endeavor, and has, apparently, ended, just as
science and history have ended for the postmodernist. Taxonomy is, for
instance, totally eliminated from one recent definition our field:
"...phylogenetics and biogeography, together referred to as
systematics" (Erwin, 1991). A merely useful classification is itself
apparently not a worthy end, though even Hennig (1966: 7) wrote that the task
of systematics is to create a general reference system. O'Hara (1988, 1996)
has demonstrated the apparent efficacy of cladistics in solving problems in
stemmatics and has proposed a formal name for the "historical
sciences" (presumably based on numerical analyses) using Whewell's term
"palaetiology"; one might urge that the definitions of "ancestral"
nodes of such analyses match those of the terminal elements to ensure
generalization. Mayr (1976: 471) wrote that "A
sound classification of a group of organisms cannot be devised without a
well-considered reconstruction of its phylogeny," but I feel that
although "An eclectic classification which considers with equal care the
branching points in phylogeny and all aspects of phylogenetic divergence
would seem the best way to generate biologically meaningful
classifications," this ideal is too lofty because it presupposes a
wealth of data. If sufficient model ancestors cannot be found on which to
base a phylogenetic classification satisfactorily as outlined above in a
particular study, the next best way of developing a predictive hypothesis is
to impose outside theory of special evolutionary scenarios, such as weighting
for perceived convergence; if the cladogram remains poorly resolved, one can
group the taxa phenetically, i.e. maximizing all shared characters; and if
that proves poorly resolved, then a useful artificial classification must be
developed since a classification is needed if only to pigeonhole information
for later retrieval. But will any alternative to straight Hennigian
parsimony, even in the form of the New Phyletics (Stuessy, 1990) melding
cladistic, patristic and phenetic numerical study, be considered an option to
the new generation of systematists? Must cladistics, too, like the New
Systematics and phenetics, be broken on the wheel of history by the next
newly fashionable methodology, some parvenue nemesis complete with emblem and
scurrilous, partisan web page? Or may cladistic methods and successes be
added to those of New Systematics and phenetics to better illuminate
different aspects of nature as part of the armamentarium of scientific study?
Hedberg (1995) made a strong point that cladistics should be viewed as part
of a systematics "toolkit." Kuhn (1970) had an elegant vision that
progress in science means that whole concepts are destroyed and replaced in a
series of revolutions, and only the list of explicable phenomena grows. Must
this be so? In sum, the revolutionary paradigm
shift is in the phenomenal utility of personal computers in dealing with
complex modern issues in communications, sociology, textual criticism and
science, unfortunately involving over-simplification, reductio ad absurdum,
deconstruction of past less-computerized methodologies, and insistence on
monomethodical modes of analysis. According to O'Hara (Discussion Group
PMC-Talk, 1992), among others, cladistics "constitutes a genuine
conceptual revolution, one that has not only intellectual components, but all
the characteristic socio-disciplinary turmoil that accompanies a scientific
revolution as well." Stuessy (1990: 130) thought to be exaggerated such
claims. According to L. Marx (1979), "It would be a serious
mistake...for those concerned about the future of science to underestimate
the appeal, or the force, of the neo-romantic critique of science as a mode
of knowing built on an inadequate metaphysical foundation." Cladistics
is not the revolution, just a part of it. The greater revolution is a
vainglorious over-response in many intellectual fields to the real
opportunities presented by the computer. Postmodernism has avoided nihilism,
but the new sciences discussed above require the destruction of existing
institutions before rebuilding them on a new basis. This multiplex revolution
in science is the emergence of neo-romantic monomethodical systems of
analysis or synthesis that are intended to be not just incremental or
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probability of reconstruction measure for internal cladogram branches. Syst.
Biol. 50: 425-437. EXPLANATION This paper is not much dated, even
with the great advances recently in statistical phylogenetics. At the present
time, this same postmodernist attitude accounts for the push to expend vast resources,
including National Science Foundation support, for a grand Tree of Life, one
that seldom provides a measure of reliability at any one node though
(naturally) generally reflective of our ideas of evolution. The Tree of
Life's main fault that there is no reliability measure presented for problematic
branch arrangements. Every instance of support for obvious (uncontested,
accepted) branch arrangements is a misdirection of attention away from
problematic relationships. It is the well supported elucidation of
problematic relationships that constitutes an advance in evolutionary
understanding. In addition, there a major push on
the Phylocode as a substitute or alternative to the International Codes for
plant and animal nomenclature is in train. The Phylocode, again, is an
attempt by partisans of a new science to set their own standards (of
reliability in this case) because other (or previous) sciences are
incommesurate in the Kuhnian sense. The Phylocode is based on one simplistic
method of organizing taxa, and problematic areas are dealt with arbitrarily
under the assumption that resolution is sufficient for reliability. This is
incorrect because shortest trees generated from random data sets are (almost)
all well resolved. See also my "The
Number of Gene Trees Necessary for a Probabilistic Reconstruction of the
Species Tree." I now feel that I am sufficiently
right or at least insufficiently wrong in this paper to at least squeeze it
onto the Web. Yes, it does appear as though I scanned the literature and
harvested any quotations that seemed to support my philosophical stance, but
if one is right, this is okay, isn't it? -- R. Zander, January 18, 2003. [Note: Kosko (1993) stated on p. 14
that "The yin-yang symbol is the emblem of fuzziness." (Think your
own comment now.)] |
|
Another note, September 30, 2004: For
a delightful, erudite, compelling rendering of the major historical aspects
of all of human culture and science into postmodern drivel, read: James Burke. 1985. The Day the
Universe Changed. Little, Brown and Co.; Boston. He points out that Linnaeus sought to
know the Mind of God by naming all the plants and animals, this in his
context that paradigms have changed since then and so much for taxonomy. Burke's book is interesting in no
small part because of the challenges to the reader in detecting the logical
fallacies: huge leaps assuming causal connections, arguing from the small to
the large and vice versa, concepts meant to be restricted to one situation
applied to other situations, and so on. The text is attractive for its
pyrotechnics and interesting connections, yet the last chapter is horrific in
its party-line postmodern condemnation of science and rationality. |