PS I'll be happy to forward any replies to Darth.
Re: the letters back and forth
Wilbert Hetterscheid toots his own horn on "culton," since he is the one who
proposed his term (Acta Hort. 413:29. 1995; Taxon 44:161. 1995). He has also
published a very good annotated history of the principles of cultivated plant
classification (Acta Bot. Neerl. 45:123. 1996). In this exchange of e-mail
he
writes a good introduction on changes in plant names but neglected to discuss
his cladogram properly. What and how many characters were used in
constructing the cladogram? What assumptions were made? What cladistic
software was used? PAUP? Maclade? How many cladograms resulted from the
analysis? Was this the most parsimonious? The cladistic taxonomist will
often find that more than one parsimonious cladogram (literally, a tree with
the least number of branches) will result, and the choice is often
subjective,
even though the adherents of cladistics claim that their methodology is
objective. Cladisticians will also froth at the mouth when more than two are
in a room, each one claiming that "their" method of cladistic analysis is
better than the "other" cladistic analysis. I find that cladisticians will
also interpret their analysis as data, but it is only an analysis of data.
Cladisticians also hate numerical taxonomists, who use cluster analysis and
other methods derived from standard statistics. I am still waiting for a
synthesis of the two approaches. Cladistics offers a new way of thinking,
but
none of their methods have been tested upon known phylogenies. For years I
have been urging cladistic and numerical taxonomists to work in the standard
direction of science, from the known to the unknown. Often, these methods of
analysis of data work from theory to the known, and the methods have not been
rigorously tested in the real world. We have so many known phylogenies, from
irises, to orchids, to roses, to oats, but none have been used to test the
validity of the approaches (except for one paper on linkage analysis in oats
by Baum). Molecular biologists are just as religious in their claims, and
I
particularly like the introduction to Raymond Petersen's (a pteridologist now
at Howard) Ph.D. thesis that I typed (I used to hire our my typing services
as
a grad student): "Molecular biology, with its associated trinity of DNA, RNA,
and protein, has diverted a number of systematists from measuring petal
lengths along the primrose path towards phylogeny to a course supposedly more
correctly aligned with the inheritance of the individual taxon." Our advisor
chopped this sentence up, but I liked the original so much that it has stuck
in my memory.
Thanks for the e-mails!
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