CKing said:

"The cladists' dogmatic intolerance of paraphyletic taxa is perhaps one of most destructive forces facing taxonomy today."



Richard Wells said:

Well, being one that can identify with "destructive forces", I can well see the point you are making..., a bit dogmatically, but with no small amount of justification.



I remember first reading the papers of Willie Hennig and his apparatchiks and thinking what the hell is going on here? I must confess that as the Cladist dogma spread, it turned me right off "Systematic Zoology", a journal that I just couldn't wait to read previously. I know it might seem a bit inappropriate, but I have always seen cladism also as a convenient way for creationists to get involved in evolutionary biology at a purportedly taxonomic level. Prayer, blind faith and slavish idolatry would be major prerequisites for a cladistic approach to taxonomy, so creationists would be preadapted to the method. It seems to me that some cladists believe that they have true power to comprehend it all, as though they are on a path that will lead to a holy grail of biology - a sort of Combined Field Theory of taxonomy. But if Einstein had been a cladist...who knows, maybe his work might not have become "one of most destructive forces facing [humanity] today", so maybe there are worse problems than cladists...Sorry, must go...time's getting on you know. I have to go and split-up a few more paraphyletic genera before bedtime!



Richard Wells

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