Wolfgang wrote:

Character homology is *central* to the Hennigian approach. The better cladistic studies contain abundant discussions of character states and homology.



My response:

I agree that homology is central to systematics, not just to the Hennigian approach. All systematists should be concerned with homology, not just the "better cladistic studies."



Wolfgang wrote:

As to self-proclaimed leaders... - they are not self-proclaimed, they lead through producing the most influential papers that the most people cite, and are recognised for that. And, at the moment, they happen to be people like Arnold Kluge, Michael Lee, Olivier Rieppel, Kevin de Queiroz, Jacques Gauthier, and others, all of them cladists, not the greats of the 1950s and 1960s (who led then by being the best at the time, and brilliant they were, too), and whose word you seem to regard as final on everything. Deal with it.



My response:

Kluge writes in his paper on Calabaria and Erycine snake phylogeny: "Homology is dealt with only indirectly by character congruence, the ultimate arbiter of character history." That means Kluge did not analyze his characters.



Michael Lee has written a paper arguing that one of Olivier Rieppel's taxonomic characters, the hooked fifth metatarsal, is a convergence. At least Lee is analyzing his characters.



As for Jacques Gauthier, he himself admits that he did not analyze his characters in his paper on the origin of birds.



de Queiroz himself has been criticized for selecting diet as a character in his analysis of the iguanian lizards.



In sum, most of the people you cite as being leaders in the field of herpetology do not analyze their characters. They are therefore more likely to rely on convergent characters than on homologies. It appears that these people are not true to the Hennigian approach nor can their studies be classified as "better cladistic studies" by your own definition.

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