A new cladistics of cladists

Abstract

Cladistics, also known as phylogenetic systematics, is an approach to systematics developed during the 20th century. Many of its basic concepts were formulated by Hennig (1950), though it then passed through important changes, especially during the last four decades (Platnick 1979; Nelson and Platnick 1981; Brady 1982, 1984) During this time contributions to specialized journals such as Systematic Zoology (currently Systematic Biology) and Cladistics have demonstrated the emergence of cladistics as a new and exciting field, with articles by Daniel Brooks, Joel Cracraft, James S. Farris, Arnold Kluge, Mary Mickevich, Gareth Nelson, Norman Platnick and Ed Wiley, among others, tackling important theoretical and methodological issues in systematics. The ‘systematics wars’ of 20 years ago, chronicled by Hull (1988), were a cause celebre. Hennigian cladists, transformed cladists, pattern cladists and pheneticists fought out the ‘cladistic revolution’. James Carpenter, in what he described as a ‘‘parody of a study’’ (Carpenter 1987, p. 374), presented a fascinating insight into how a cladist might classify systematists during a time when cladistics was undergoing, or appeared to be undergoing, an intellectual revolution. He created a binary matrix of 40 systematists and philosophers of science and 14 characters. The resulting cladogram supported none of the previously recognised groups or ‘‘schools’’. Why? With hindsight, it seems that characters such as ‘‘conference’’, ‘‘computers’’, ‘‘Popperian’’ or ‘‘punc eq’’ were not altogether appropriate.