[Taxacom] What is Homo sapiens

[John Grehan]

All systematic arrangements may be viewed as artifacts of a particular
method - whether cladistic, phenetic, Zandean etc. Whether or not they
model anything in nature is a matter of individual interpretation. Just
because cladistic methods may generate dichotomies (as can phenetic
methods) it does not mean that speciation has to be dichotomous. The fact
that dichotomies are often found may suggest that dicotomous speciation is
common, or that character relationships are often resolvable to dichotomous
arrangements - at least in my opinion.

John Grehan

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 4:26 PM, Richard Zander <Richard.Zander at mobot.org>
wrote:

> A clade is a dichotomously branching artifact of cladistic method. A clade
> is not a model of anything in nature. Evolution does not progress by a node
> representing a set of traits of all distal taxa evolving into a set of
> traits of the next node of more deeply advanced set of taxa.  This is not
> the evolutionary continuity we all learned about pre-Hennig.
>
>
> Cladists (e.g. Eldredge) assert clearly and without shame that traits
> evolve into other traits, and that is evolution.  If so, it kind of
> justifies cladistics, but if not a good model of what really happens in
> evolution, it is a shuck.
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> on behalf of Tony Rees
> <tonyrees49 at gmail.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2018 6:00 PM
> To: taxacom
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] What is Homo sapiens
>
> From the cited paper: "...For, if the suggestion of a clade that includes
> H. sapiens is correct, it follows that Homo should be restricted to members
> of this clade. By logical extension, hypothetical neanderthalensis and
> heidelbergensis clades, regardless of their relationship to a sapiens
> clade, should be regarded as separate genera." This sounds like devil's
> advocacy to me (or reduction to the absurd) - if workers cannot even agree
> on whether of not neanderthalensis is a subspecies of sapiens, putting it
> into a separate genus makes no sense to this observer - or perhaps I am
> missing something.
>
> Also I noticed an odd statement at the beginning - "Thus it fell upon
> Blumenbach (1969) to provide the first morphological diagnosis of Homo
> sapiens." - especially considering that the Blumenbach in question died
> some 129 years earlier (I remembered from the recent thread in which we
> discussed the earliest scientific name for the dingo). I checked the cited
> reference and it is a 1969 reprint of an 1865 work published under the
> title "The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach", in
> which is reprinted  Blumenbach's "On the natural variety of mankind",
> first(?) published in 1775. So if "Blumenbach (1969)" were replaced by
> "Blumenbach
> (1775)" it would make rather more sense. Hopefully the remainder of the
> paper is a bit more factually correct :)
>
> Regards - Tony
>
> Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
> https://about.me/TonyRees
> [https://aboutme.imgix.net/background/users/t/o/n/
> tonyrees_1442476357_27.jpg?q=80&dpr=1&auto=format&fit=crop&
> w=250&h=140&crop=faces]<https://about.me/TonyRees>
>
> Tony Rees - New South Wales, Australia | about.me<https://about.me/
> TonyRees>
> about.me
> I am a software engineer in New South Wales, Australia. Visit my website.
>
>
>
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