[Taxacom] Psychocosm of Cognitive Dissonance

[Richard Zander]

I bring up the same arguments repeatedly because the same mistakes keep surfacing. I don't mean the minor stuff, but the world-shaking, mind-numbing, costly-to-society mistakes. 

Why are these mistakes repeated so often? I believe it is because of the: 

"Phylogenetic Psychocosm of Cognitive Dissonance"

wherein that which is not true - important things that are not true - are cherished and repeated like a mantra. Such things as: characters evolve (no, taxa or populations do); science without theory is still science (no, it is structuralism); expressed traits are not important in evolution, and all you need is an ahistorical Markov chain (no, Darwin emphasized "change of species by descent"); a node on a cladogram implies a speciation event (no, not unless you can identify or guess at the species that changes into another and phylogeneticists do not even try); stuff like that. 

I see biosystematists are making a comeback. Good on them. There is hope.



 
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Richard H. Zander 
Missouri Botanical Garden, PO Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166-0299 USA 
Web sites: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/ and http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/bfna/bfnamenu.htm
Modern Evolutionary Systematics Web site: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/21EvSy.htm


-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Curtis Clark
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2011 2:16 PM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Dark taxa: GenBank in a post-taxonomic world
[snip]
On a lighter note, does bringing up the same arguments repeatedly violate Dollo's Law? :-)

--
Curtis Clark
Cal Poly Pomona