Beyond Cladistics: The Branching of a Paradigm

10. Beyond Belief: The Steady Resurrection of Phenetics

169 TEN D avid M. Williams, Malte C. Ebach, and Quentin D. Wheeler BEYOND BELIEF The Steady Resurrection of Phenetics Those who cannot accept the heady mixture of operationalism and objectivity should divert their attention to other things, such as the collation of published information advocated by Waters (1961). (Barker 1996: 670) I have waited a long time for this. . . . I shall build a new race of Daleks. They will be even more deadly and I, Davros, shall be their leader! This time we shall triumph. My Daleks shall once more become the supreme beings! (Doctor Who: “Resurrection of the Daleks,” BBC 1984) Nowadays phenetics per se is rarely taught in systematics courses, its heyday during the 1960s supposedly having come and gone. For example , botanist Richard Jensen, reviewing the Twenty-fifth Numerical Taxonomy Conference held at the University of Pittsburgh sixteen years ago, made the following comments: This anniversary meeting allowed reflection on the impact that numerical taxonomy has had on systematics and comparative biology. Although few would agree with Herbert Ross’s opinion that “numerical taxonomy is an Beyond Cladistics: The Branching of a Paradigm, edited by David M. Williams and Sandra Knapp.Copyright byTheRegentsoftheUniversityofCalifornia.Allrightsofreproduction in any form reserved. 170 / CLADI ST I CS excursion in futility,” it is clear that its role in systematics has not evolved as proponents projected: The methods are rarely used as the foundations for classifications. (Jensen 1993: 599) Cladistics, on the other hand, remains if not a persistent (and menacing ) presence (Brummitt 2006), then, as it was at first perceived, a shadowy specter (Campbell 1975: 86), dominating biological classification. Yet recently Mishler posed the following question: “Why is it that . . . virtually all systematists (at least the younger generations) are now Hennigian phylogenetic systematists?” (Mishler 2009: 63). Odd, too, that in his account of the history of numerical taxonomy, based on a presentation at the same Numerical Taxonomy Conference Jensen summarized, Sneath offered the following, a view that contrasts in an absolute sense to Mishler’s: “Hennigian cladistics, however, is a side issue that has not proven its value. Numerical taxonomy in the broadest sense is the greatest advance in systematics since Darwin or perhaps since Linnaeus” (Sneath 1995: 281, from abstract). Leaving aside the view that numerical taxonomy is “the greatest advance in systematics since Darwin or perhaps since Linnaeus,” Sneath’s general claim rests on his assessment of numerical taxonomy’s influence , having “stimulated several new areas of growth, including numerical phylogenetics, molecular taxonomy, morphometrics, and numerical identification” (Sneath 1995: 281, from abstract). Mishler’s claim stems from the answer he provides to his own question : “. . . divergent evolution is the single most powerful and general process underlying biological diversity” (Mishler 2009: 63). Mishler’s claim for success is a process, but his meaning implies its representation as a tree. That is, the tree as reality rather than metaphor, originating from Charles Darwin’s work which helped Ernst Haeckel turn the old metaphorical tree—the hierarchical relationships expressed in a classification —into “a condensation of real events, rather than a metaphor” (Beer 1983: 38) coupled with, some years later, Willi Hennig recognizing the profit to be gained from monophyletic classification, a direct and accurate representation of that tree (Hennig 1966). The contrast is Sneath views the issue from the point of view of methodology, Mishler from a cause and its representation. Such a contrast has been noted before, with respect to cladistics: Cladistics is a term with two distinct meanings. In one, it implies acceptance of a cladistic position on classification, the view that groups in the BEYOND BELI EF / 171 classification system should be monophyletic. In its other meaning, it signifies an interest in reconstructing phylogenies, without regard to how the classification system is set up. . . . The question of how to construct classifications and how to reconstruct phylogenies are logically separable, so that it would be better to avoid the word cladistics altogether. (Felsenstein 1984: 169; Felsenstein 1983a: 315 and Felsenstein 2004: 145–146) Avoiding the word is a possibility, but others have considered the whole matter superfluous, such as Hughes, who nearly a dozen years ago, wrote: The conflict between pheneticists and cladists properly belongs to the era of morphological systematics—an era that is now effectively at an end. The availability of molecular data has revolutionized the field and made many old controversies obsolete. (Hughes, 1999: 34, see also Kim 2001) Regardless of any truth in...