University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

I\'m in the US on UK time, so this is probably a bad idea to write this,
but the paper by Malte Ebach et al. (\"O Cladistics, Where Art Thou?\",
[doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2008.00225.x](http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-0031.2008.00225.x))
in the latest *Cladistics* just annoys me too much. Rather than the call
to arms that the authors intend, I think they\'ve provided one more
example of the death throes of cladistics (in the narrow parsimony is
all, statistical methods are evil, molecular systematics is phenetics,
barcoding is killing taxonomy sense).  

> Associations, such as the Willi Hennig society, and journals, such as
> *Cladistics*, were erected in order to tackle the growing problem of
> pheneticists, purveyors of overall similarity, clustering and
> divergence rates. Rather than challenge molecular systematists and
> their numerical taxonomic methods, we take part. *Where is our
> integrity?*

Gosh, maybe people realised that molecular data are useful, that
molecular data benefit from statistical analysis, and that divergence
rates (and times) were of great biological interest? Fancy that!  

> What happened to the Cladistic Revolution? Today, students appear to
> have no knowledge of that Revolution. They graduate as students did so
> before the Revolution, with a sound knowledge of phenetics, ancestor
> worship and a healthy dose of molecular genetics. *What happened to
> taxonomy and cladistics?*

I suspect the real drivers in the \"Revolution\" were: the development
methods that could be implemented in computer software (I include
parsimony in this); computer hardware that was becoming cheaper and more
powerful; and, the growth of molecular data (i.e., data that was easily
digitised). I don\'t mean to imply that everything was technologically
driven, but I suspect it was a combination of a desire to infer
evolutionary trees coupled with plausible means of doing so that drove
the \"revolution\", rather than any great conceptual framework.  

> Such matters as the Phylocode, DNA taxonomy and barcoding, for
> example, have risen to prominence despite criticism of their many ﬂaws
> and illogical conclusions. The attempts of these applied technologies
> to derail almost 250 years of scholarship are barely even questioned
> by our own peers with only a few taking a stand (e.g., [Will and
> Rubinoﬀ, 2004](http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-0031.2003.00008.x);
> [Wheeler, 2005](http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-0031.2005.00075.x)).

Barcoding is happening, get over it. There are technical issues with its
ability to identify \"species\", but to object to it on ideological
grounds (as papers published in *Cladistics* tend to do) is ultimately
futile. If the authors dealt with bacteria they wouldn\'t bat an eyelid.
Besides, I suspect that the ability to identify organisms, or discover
clusters of similar sequences will be among the least interesting
applications of barcoding. There will be a wealth of standardised,
geotagged data from across life around the planet. People not blinkered
by ideology will do interesting things with these data.  

> Barcoding is understood as a ''solution'' (to what, one might ask?),
> systematics journals are infested with phenetics and population
> genetics (cladistics has vanished), both, seemingly, directing the
> course and future of taxonomy. *Where are the scholars?*

Personally I use the term \"phenetics\" as a litmus test. If anybody
says that a method is \"phenetic\" then I pretty much switch off. Almost
always, if somebody uses this term they simply don\'t understand what
they are talking about. If you describe a method as \"phenetic\" then
that tells me that you either don\'t understand the method, or you\'re
too lazy to try and understand it.  
  
In some ways all this saddens me. I was an undergraduate student around
the time of the heyday of the New York school, thought [Systematics and
Biogeography: Cladistics and
Vicariance](http://www.librarything.com/work/6918684/book/39253234) was
a great (if flawed) book (and I still do), and did my first post doc
with Gary Nelson at the AMNH. It was a great time to be a student.
Phylogenetic trees were appearing in all sorts of places, and
systematists were tackling big topics such as biogeography,
diversification, coevolution, and development. There was a sense of
ambition, and excitement. Yet now it seems that *Cladistics* has become
a venue for reactionary rants by people unable to break out of the
comforting (but ultimately crippling) coherence of the hard-core
cladist\'s world view.


I'm in the US on UK time, so this is probably a bad idea to write this, but the paper by Malte Ebach et al. ("O Cladistics, Where Art Thou?", doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2008.00225.x) in the latest
<em>
 Cladistics
</em>
just annoys me too much.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Death throes of Cladistics