I'm home on Google - discussing cladistics as a special case of fanatism

Now, I'm home at Google blogspot. Google really understands the problems in painting reality. It understands that reality can't be painted unambiguously in present, and thus much less so in past. It would never even consider falling into the double ambiguity, that is, contradiction, cladistics has fallen into. It may fail to realize that this contradiction actually is Russell's paradox seen from the subjective side, but it would definitely not fall into it.

So, in this blog I plan to develop my, which I think is extremely interesting, dissection of cladistics. For me, cladistics was a shock when I first encountered it - a totally stupid (i.e., simple-minded erroneous) simplification which for me appeared more like a joke than a serious approach - but I have gradually attained understanding of the underlying approach (i.e., realism) and the motives in this approach for this totally stupid (i.e., simpleminded erroneous) simplification. When I first questioned the consistency of the approach among cladists, I was surprised by that my points didn't seem to penetrate into their minds. It was just as if they couldn't see them just because they didn't want to see them. They refused to acknowledge them even when I put them in front of their eyes excluding all alternatives. They obviously had a blind spot for their inconsistencies in their belief. They couldn't even see how their own assumptions consistently contradict the conclusions they derive from them. They obviously had no sense what-so-ever for overall consistency (i.e., that everything have to fit together).

I realized that this issue in a larger perspective is a discusion about fanatism. Cladists are neither interested in finding out how reality works in a generic sense nor of how we can reconstruct history, but just of how history is best reconstructed in their perspective. They have lost (or have never had?) openness for different generic approaches in describing reality, but instead claim that they have The Correct Approach (denying all others). And, they simply presume that there is a Single True Approach in describing reality and it is, of course, their approach. And, their approach is that there is A Single True Description of the history of biological organisms to be found, although there are loads of both considerations and facts that contradict this approach, because, in their own terminology, it is "the most parsimonious" approach. They thus prefer an inconsistent and erroneous approach because it is "the most parsimonious", in practice meaning pure subjectivity. They thus seriously claim that pure subjectivity should be preferred because it is "the most parsimonious" approach. It indeed, is, but is this really a sensible reason to prefer contradiction? Or to start chasing the rainbow? Doesn't it matter that the approach is both consistently inconsistent and empirically erroneous?

The fanatism of the cladistic approach resides in that it is only open specifically, that is, within the boundaries of the approach (thus, pure subjectivity). It explicitly denies all other approaches (among them, specifically the scientific approach "objectivity"). It thus denies the fact that there are several ways to look at one and the same thing. This is the hall mark of fanatism. The problem for those outside of a fanatism is how they shall handle fanatics (like cladists). Amos Oz recently discussed this issue. Unfortunately, neither he nor anyone else has found a solution to this problem. Their consistent refusal to acknowledge anything else than one own's subjective opinion, or in the case of cladistics, subjectivity in general, is difficult to handle. Such conviction does not yield to anything, because for the convinced, there simply are no alternatives.