SSZ 1970–1989: A View of the Years of Conflict

Abstract

I entered the phylogenetic scheme of thingsas a graduate student at TheOhio State University in 1975. I stumbled overHennig’s book (1966) theŽrst year ofmyOSUgraduate career and by checking the references under Hennig in the Science Citation Index I discovered the journal Systematic Zoology. It was as if I had fallen into another world, quite like Alice when she followed the rabbit down the rabbit hole under the hedge. “In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again” (Gardner, 1960). Indeed the quiet and ordered world of botany gave way to the rough and tumble world of systematic zoology in the mid-1970s and I have never quite gotten out of it. In 1976 I wrote a number of people who were publishing in Systematic Zoology and asked them for advice and reprints. The one that wrote back was Don Rosen from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the center of the cladistic movement in the United States. He invited me to visit and, for me, it was much like Alice’s tea party; I met Don Rosen, Gary Nelson, Norm Platnick, Toby Schuh, Steve Farris, Niles Eldredge, Mary Mickevich, and other members of the staff in the coffee/tea area of the Museum—a mad and fascinating group if ever there was one! I wanted to join. This tea party was followed by the AMNH Systematics Discussion Group and my Žrst exposure to the famous New York Rules that governed or, more accurately, did not govern the proceedings. At that time one could gain a perspective of phylogenetic systematics by Žrst reading Hennig (1966) and then simply going to Systematic Zoology, beginning with Kluge and Farris (1969) and Nelson (1969) and reading through to the present. The articles, and even more so the points-of-view, laid bare the philosophy behind the phylogeny and classiŽcation of organisms; it was all there in the journal. Before 1969, the discussion centered on the differences between traditional taxonomy, evolutionary systematics, and numerical taxonomy (NT, or phenetics), with supporters of this last approach claiming to be the only ones with an objective method. However, the heyday of NT as an indicator of phylogeny did not last. At Žrst, Sokal and his colleagues had criticized the evolutionary systematists and traditional taxonomists and pretty much had the quantitative Želd to themselves. But soon there was a new kid on the block; the cladists had arrived.Both theevolutionary systematistsand the cladists found NT to be less than useful when it came to generating phylogenetic hypotheses. That did not mean, of course, that the methods of Hennig were accepted by the evolutionary systematists or the traditional taxonomists. In fact, Hennig’s phylogenetic systematic methods were dismissed by Mayr (1965), Sokal (1967), Blackwelder (1977), and just about everyone else; the Žght was on for recognition. As a graduate student, I found the logic of Hennig combined with Popper and then Croizat very appealing and I jumped head Žrst into the fray, loving every minute of it. Synapomorphy, monophyly, and parsimony were the watchwords, and we promoted them relentlessly in papers and symposia (see Hull, 1988) and argued about them passionately at the drop of a hat. In the mid 1970s, thanks largely to the efforts of Nelson, quite a number of zoologists around the world were practicing the methods of Hennig, whereas only a few other botanists were involved in the cladistic debate: ChrisHumphires in theU.K. andKu areBremer andHans-ErikWanntorp in Sweden. The four of us endeavored to convince botanists around the world that this was the best way to produce phylogenies. Since 1977, I have attended all but two of the annual meetings of the Society of Systematic Zoology/Society of Systematic Biologists (SSZ/SSB). During the years covered by this essay, the meetings were not well