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Systematics and the Darwinian Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Kevin de Queiroz
Kevin de Queiroz*
Affiliation:
Department of Zoology and Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Taxonomies of living things and the methods used to produce them changed little with the institutionalization of evolutionary thinking in biology. Instead, the relationships expressed in existing taxonomies were merely reinterpreted as the result of evolution, and evolutionary concepts were developed to justify existing methods. I argue that the delay of the Darwinian Revolution in biological taxonomy has resulted partly from a failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different ways of ordering identified by Griffiths (1974): classification and systematization. Classification consists of ordering entities into classes, groups defined by the attributes of their members; in contrast, systematization consists of ordering entities into systems, more inclusive entities whose existence depends on some natural process through which their parts are related. Evolutionary, or phylogenetic, systematics takes evolutionary descent to be the natural process of interest in biological taxonomy. I outline a general framework for a truly phylogenetic systematics and examine some of its consequences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 238 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I bear a tremendous intellectual debt to G. C. D. Griffiths, M. T. Ghiselin, and D. L. Hull, whose writings laid the foundation for this contribution. Other people who have strongly influenced my thinking either through conversations or their writings are R. de Queiroz, M. J. Donoghue, J. A. Gauthier, W. Hennig, E. Mayr, G. Nelson, M. A. Norell, M. J. Novacek, C. Patterson, N. I. Platnick, G. G. Simpson, E. O. Wiley, A. Wyss, and a host of other taxonomists arguing the virtues of their approaches and the drawbacks of others. M. J. Donoghue, R. Estes, J. A. Gauthier, M. T. Ghiselin, H. W. Greene, D. L. Hull, D. B. Wake, M. H. Wake, E. O. Wiley, and an anonymous referee provided valuable comments on earlier versions of the paper.

References

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