Classification, Evolution, and the Nature of Biology

Alec L. Panchen (Author)

9780521315784, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 June 1992

416 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.61 kg

"Panchen's synthesis of the historical development of classification and evolution, richly interwoven with his own critical comments and personal reflections as a vertebrate paleontologist and systematist, is provocative and stimulating...Panchen's book succeeds where other of its kind fail because he is refreshingly honest, because he maintains a healthy respect for skepticism without lapsing into the usual condescending rhetoric..." Terry Harrison, International Journal of Primatology

Historically, naturalists who proposed theories of evolution, including Darwin and Wallace, did so in order to explain the apparent relationship of natural classification. This book begins by exploring the intimate historical relationship between patterns of classification and patterns of phylogeny. However, it is a circular argument to use the data for classification. Alec Panchen presents other evidence for evolution in the form of a historically based but rigorously logical argument. This is followed by a history of methods of classification and phylogeny reconstruction including current mathematical and molecular techniques. The author makes the important claim that if the hierarchical pattern of classification is a real phenomenon, then biology is unique as a science in making taxonomic statements. This conclusion is reached by way of historical reviews of theories of evolutionary mechanism and the philosophy of science as applied to biology. The book is addressed to biologists, particularly taxonomists, concerned with the history and philosophy of their subject, and to philosophers of science concerned with biology. It is also an important source book on methods of classification and the logic of evolutionary theory for students, professional biologists, and paleontologists.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Patterns of classification
3. Patterns of phylogeny
4. Homology and the evidence for evolution
5. Geological and geographical evidence
6. Methods of classification: the development of taxonomy
7. Methods of classification: phenetics and cladistics
8. Methods of classification: the current debate
9. Classification and the reconstruction of phylogeny
10. Is systematics independent?
11. Mechanisms of evolution: Darwinism and its rivals
12. Mechanisms of evolution: the synthetic theory
13. Scientific knowledge
14. Philosophy and biology
References
Author index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Evolution [PSAJ], Taxonomy & systematics [PSAB]