Biological Systematics by Pavlinov Igor Ya

Author:Pavlinov, Igor Ya.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Groups
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Considering the results of the development of the phenetic research program in systematics from a general philosophical scientific perspective, it should be noted, first of all, that both its basic features and limitations are rooted in the positivist philosophy of science underlying it. Contrary to its initial assumptions, phenetic theory is not free from certain substantive theorizing and therefore is not strictly empirical: from a conceptualist standpoint, phenetic classifications, if actually independent of any meaningful theory, become meaningless [Rosenberg 1985; Pavlinov and Lyubarsky 2011; Pavlinov 2018]. Well-known objections to the theory-free interpretation of random research sampling and assumed to be “as if objective” overall similarity are considered elsewhere in this book (see Sections 3.7 and 6.3). Therefore, if the rise of the phenetic idea was due to an enthusiastic acquisition of positivist philosophy by systematics, then debunking of the claims of this philosophy to an “ultimate” philosophical scientific consistency caused the growing influence of post-positivist philosophy of science, leading to a decline in interest in this research program.

At the same time, some important provisions of the phenetic theory found a fairly wide application in those research programs that do not identify themselves with it. Thus, in phylogenomics, the idea of reduction of the organism to a set of automatically recognized uncorrelated unit characters is brought to perfection: nucleotide bases in DNA or RNA molecules are interpreted in this way. In cladistics, a clear “phenetic spirit” is introduced by the principle of total evidence put forward in the early 20th century by positivist methodology; it is also present implicitly in phylogenomics in the form of whole-genome analyses [Savva et al. 2003].

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