[Taxacom] What is Homo sapiens

[Richard Zander]

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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