Popper as a process: revisiting the appropriation of the Popperian philosophy by the cladists during the “systematics wars”

Abstract

The philosophy of Karl Popper was strongly used by the cladists in their battle against evolutionary and numerical taxonomy. It became known as “Systematics Wars” by David Hull. His historical account in Science as a Process, described the outcome of that era that end up with the victory of cladistics. Claiming it as hypothetico-deductivist, and falsificationist, cladists have transformed and distorted Popper, that almost nothing of these ideas survived scrutiny. One of the Hull’s conclusion was that the success of cladistics was largely due to their ability to maintain social cohesion and intellectual orthodoxy during the years of the Systematic Wars. In this paper, I will provide a concise historical development about the appropriation of Popper’s ideas that were used by systematics, both as a defense and as a critic, trying to make clear the interpretations of these authors in relation to Popper and their research program. Using David Hull’s General Theory of Selection Processes, I will argue that these facts were, partially, to a heavy adherence to Popper’s philosophy.