fredag 24 maj 2013

On the concept "clade" and the belief "cladistics"

The now popular concept "clade" in biological systematics is actually an infinitely recursive concept, like "the list of all lists", by including itself as a member of itself. A belief that this concept indeed can break even, today called "Cladistics", and its corollary search for what it calls "the true tree of life", is actually in practice a belief that every clade is what cladistics calls a "sister-group" to itself and that the most inclusive clade also is a sister-group to the least inclusive clade. It is thus an absurd belief by believing in the obviously absurd.

Linnean systematics and Evolutionary taxonomy avoid this sink hole by arranging concepts orthogonally as categories of classes (of organisms).

The question whether there is such a "single true tree of life" or not thus has a negative answer - there isn't. Instead, there are actually several equally true graph illustrations of a hypothesized evolutionary origin of biological organisms. Large scale change (ie, evolution) actually can't be unambiguous if small scale change is, because only entities are unambiguous and they are physically nested as INDEPENDENT entities in other entities. Unambiguity in change at different scales at the same time actually requires total dependency between entities on different scales, which, in turn, makes change impossible. The cladistic belief in a single true tree of life does thus contradict its own assumption of the underlying process (ie, evolution) itself. Cladistics does thus believe in something it at the same time denies.

Giddy, this siding in biological systematics, isn't it?

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