On the fundamental error of cladistics

Those biological systematists that are called cladists conflate entity (or object) with class. It means that they also conflate monophyletic groups of entities with monophyletic groups of classes.

This conflation makes cladists erroneously believe that monophyletic groups of entities can be consistently distinguished as monophyletic groups of classes with what they call "apomorphies", and picks up that thread in a practical search for such groups.

Their conflated kind of monophyletic group is, however, what biological systematists searched for for about 2,000 years before Linné, and failed. The problem with such groups is that entities consist of classes in that every entity belongs to several classes, and that the relation between entities and classes thus is not 1-1, but 1-many, and that the relation between classes and entities thus is many-1, The latter part of this relation, ie, many-1, between classes and entities, means that there are several classes that fit one entity, and thus that there also are several monophyletic groups of classes that fit one monophyletic group of entities. There simply isn't a 1-1 relation between monophyletic groups of entities and monophyletic groups of classes which cladists erroneously believe there is.

This fundamental error of cladists´means that they search for something that isn't to be found (ie, the true tree of life). Their conflation of entity (or object) with class has lured them into the belief that there is a 1-1 relation between monophyletic groups of entities and monophyletic groups of classes, which simply is wrong. Instead, their search for this singularity is in practice an infinite recursion. It is, actually, the same search for an infinite recursion as it was before Linné. This reinvented (cladistic) approach is thus just as vain as it was before Linné, but adherents of it appears to have difficulties abandoning it. Demonstration that it is inconsistent does obviously not suffice to make them abandon it.

This fundamental error of cladistics is thus obviously larger than facts. It appears to be what we tend to believe in contradiction to facts. In the case of cladistics, it has led some of us (ie, cladists) into a vain search for something that isn't to be found, but which they believe in, ie, the true tree of life. Not even the fact that there isn't any such thing to be found suffices to make them stop searching it. Somewhere here something is fundamentally stupid.