Kevin Worth recently re-posted a post of Tom Bethell on cladistics that
contained the following:
> I was impressed that top people at the American Museum of
>Natural History, and the British Museum, would say such things.
>Most people to this day know nothing about it. ...
>One of the problems with the cladists is that their
>writings are laden with technical jargon, and they have made no
>attempt to popularize their work; if anything they may have
>preferred not to antagonize the powers that be by doing so.
>A peaceful life is one of the rewards of near-unintelligibility.
I believe Stephen Jones recently alluded to some claims that cladists
weren't committed to evolution as well.
I had meant to post something then about this and will do so now since the
topic has resurfaced.
First, the second most recent issue of Natural History (June, I believe),
is devoted to the re-opening of the dinosaur exhibit at the American Museum
of Natural History. Very nice issue by the way. In it is a popular level
introduction to cladistics, fully interpreted within an evolutionary
framework. No animosity to evolution by the cladists who wrote and
published this article.
Second, cladists have developed their methodology in reaction to an
evolutionary systematics that depended to much on subjective criteria and
evolutionary stories. They did not deny (at least most of them) that
evolutionary processes and phylogenetic branching were the underlying
explanation for the cladograms. As I argued with Walter Remine over a year
ago on this reflector, while it is true that technically speaking
cladograms are not phylogenies and that ancestors are not identified in
cladistics, nearly all cladists would admit that the phylogeny stands
behind the cladogram and that the evolutionary process produces the nested
patterns and that there were ancestors. Even Colin Patterson is an
evolutionist. Certainly, Niles Eldredge (also a cladist) is an
evolutionist. Their point is simply to put systematics (and thus the
discernment of the phylogeny given the evolutionary explanation for the
cladogram) on a more rigorous scientific basis that avoids the subjectivity
of evolutionary systematics.
Again, I see this to be a case where creationists are taking internal
squabbles among evolutionists and trying to convey to the general public
that evolutionists can agree among themselves and don't even believe their
own theory anymore.
My own assessment is that cladistics is probably a useful corrective to
some trends in biology in the middle of the 20th century and that it does
seem to put systematics on a more firm foundation. I will also grant that
you can do cladistics on things that aren't evolutionarily related and
produce a cladogram, but that has always been the case. Similarity (or
common features) does not necessarily imply biological ancestry. But
neither does it undermine the evolutionary claims made as a result of
cladistic methodologies in the biological world. Evolutionary relatedness
is a perfectly good hypothesis to explain the nested patterns. Conversely,
the nested patterns are perfectly good evidence for evolution.
(I will admit that common design by God can explain nested patterns too;
although in my opinion design by God can explain whatever pattern is
observed.)
Terry G.
_____________________________________________________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 40546
Office: (616) 957-7187 FAX: (616) 957-6501
Email: grayt@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/~grayt