Evolution of Phylogenetic Systematics

Abstract

Patterns in Nature is a collection of eleven new essays. The work is an attempt to articulate an intellectual agenda for the study of the conceptual foundations of systematics and taxonomy in a way that connects classification with larger historical themes in the biological sciences, including morphology, experimental and observational approaches, evolution, biogeography, debates over form and function, character transformation, and biodiversity. The volume has two overarching themes. The first is to throw light on the current state of systematics by understanding the details of its history and the history of closely related disciplines and debates. The second theme is to provide enough of the details about the chronology and changes in concepts and contexts that a new generation of researchers will have a framework for taking up questions. While evolutionary systematics represents an important chapter in the recent history of biology, the rise of cladistics in the 1970s and 1980s argues for attention to Willi Hennig and his forerunners, collaborators, interlocutors, and critics. In an attempt to fill in a largely unwritten history and a lacuna in the conceptual map of modern systematics, Patterns in Nature features discussions of the work of Adolf Naef, Walter Zimmermann, Leon Croizat, Lars Brundin, and Colin Patterson, among others. This book also asks after the future of systematics, with chapters that discuss some recent and new additions to theory and practice that technology has made possible.

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