Cladistics and "Eclecticism"

[Thomas DiBenedetto]

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Wendt
We spent a lot of time trying to define and understand species on
biological (including ecological) grounds, and on trying to understand the
variations in how species are organized.  Species were (are) a very real
thing to us.  Higher levels were based on relationships (internal and
external), but species were based on their intrinsic qualities;
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What are the intrinsic qualities of a species? I can understand the
intrinsic qualities of organisms, and I can understand the relationships of
inheritence that result in particular distributions of characters, and that
bind organisms into a lineage, but what are the qualities that exist at the
species level to which you refer?
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However, the sudden symbiosis between molecular
systematics and cladistics led to a very new way of working.
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This is totally wrong. It has nothing to do with molecular systematics. I
learned my cladistics before the rise of molecular systematics, and though
my views have (I hope) grown and developed, I have not adopted a totally new
way of thinking. The notion of species as taxa i.e. species defined in
relationship to their place in an overall classification of nature is the
_original_ conception of species. That is why we use the words "species" and
"genus" - the specific instances and the general categories in an overall
system.  Ecological, biological and evolutionary studies of species can
broaden our understanding of the taxa that systematists discover
empirically.
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 to you (and me), the species is real; to Tom DiB., it is a relationship.
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For me, species, as well as higher taxa, are real - their reality is a
function of the relationships of inheritence between the organisms that are
parts of the taxon. What kind of reality are you referrring to?

Tom DiBenedetto