Malte Ebach touches on the destiny of cladistics – eternal reclassification

In his post “Paraphyly Watch 1: Fossil Fish & Missing Links” Malte Ebach enters his cladistic reasoning using the phrase that “There are many ways to say “Oh #!@*! My group is paraphyletic!”.

He then gives an example of this from Brazeau, 2009 ending up with the statement that “Paraphyly sure is a ‘common problem’” asking the question “Why is this problematic?”.

Answering this question, he accuses Brazeau for being ”naive to suggest” that his discovery will “not overturn a general consensus about… interrelationships”", instead “descending into evolutionary explanation ” stating that ”a ‘missing link’ has been found”. Malte instead denies missing links generically, claiming that they can be discarded generically by reclassification.

Reclassification is also what Malte will be occupied with for the rest of his life if he doesn’t abandon cladistics, because missing links is not a real phenomenon, but a fact originating from the fact that classification is orthogonal. Orthogonal means that one class includes two classes, like, for example, how gray includes white and black. Gray is an intermediate (a missing link) between white and black. We can of course get rid of such intermediates by reclassification each time we discover one, but we cannot get rid of such intermediates. There will always be other intermediates to discover just as sure as cladistics can turn science up-side-down. 

Missing links is thus a property of classification, not a phenomenon, and are thus not deniable.  The reason that cladists (like Malte) believe that missing links is a problem that can be solved by reclassification (i.e., a matter of ’acknowledging paraphyly in one or another group and solving this “problem” (i.e., paraphyly) by reclassification) is that they believe that kinds exist instead of understanding that it is we that create classes by classification of reality. They thus believe that unambiguous classification is possible, although it is both definitionally and empirically impossible. Cladists are, however, not susceptible to these strong arguments aginst their belief (nor to explanation of the implications of these facts on their actions from the belief), because they believe that their belief is “natural”. They do not understand what they’re doing, but they feel that it’s “natural”.   

Malte is thus right in that there are are many ways to say “”Oh #!@*! My group is paraphyletic!”, and Brazeau’s way may also be one of them. Brazeau may thus neither understand that classification is orthogonal, nor that paraphyly thus is monophyly per definition, but he does at least hesitate to throw himself into the eternal, inconsistent and empirically erroneous conceptual carousel that Malte has thrown himself into and which is called cladistics. It honors Brazeau. The destiny for cladists (like Malte) is eternal reclassification in chase for something that is nowhere to be found, what Darwin called a “vain search to define the indefinable”, using insensible and inconsistent reasoning. Brazeau’s acceptance of missing links does thus keep him on the sensible side of humanity, even if he doesn’t understand why or how. 

When cladistic’s vain search for the treasure at the foot of the rainbow is tired out, it’ll be placed among mass psychoses (most of which are “natural”).

Ps The reasoning above does only concern cladistics, not phylogenetic systematics. ds