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Is the cladistic idea compatible with Darwin’s idea?

Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:30

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The cladistic idea ”a single True Tree of Life” is a classification, ie, a pattern, of a hypothesized process, ie, Darwin’s idea ”a single True Phylogeny of Life”.

Now, if Darwin’s idea indeed is correct, a fundamental question for cladistics is whether the cladistic idea is compatible with Darwin’s idea, that is, whether a dichotomously branching process really can be consistently classified using a dichotomously branching classification?

Clear is that the process does not consist of dichotomously branching processes, because if it should, then it would dissappear (regress) into an infinity of dichotmously branching processes and thus be totally devoid of entities. So, the question is if the process can be consistently partitioned into only dichotomously branching processes?

If we investigate one such classification in the figure below (of the hypothesized five species “A” to “E”), we can see that the intermediate species “C” (actually intermediate species in such classifications in general) is ambiguous between being an ancestor and a descendant.

This ambiguity is in a classificatory sense a contradiction, and, since “C” moreover is both an ancestor and a descendant, not either or, the contradiction is moreover paradoxical, ie, assigning the species “C” as two species - one ancestor and one descendant – “at the same time”. This assignment means that the classification also implicitly assigns the species “C” mutually exclusive properties (like being both small and large or both totally green and totally red, or both having and lacking legs) “at the same time”. The ambiguity simply makes species “C” (actually intermediate species in such classifications in general) paradoxically contradictory.

The example reveals that the cladistic idea of “a single Tree of Life”, ie, a single True pattern, is incompatible with Darwin’s idea of “a single Phylogeny of Life”, ie, a single True process. This incompatibility means that there have to be several of either True Trees of Life or True Phylogenies of Life, and, since the latter also would imply the former, which it is incompatible with, it must be the former. It means that there are several True Trees of Life if there are any True Trees of Life at all (ie, if there is a True Phylogeny of Life). The cladistic idea of “a single True Tree of Life” is actually a paradoxical contradiction (meaning that it is an infinite recursion when searching it).

The example thus shows that the cladistic idea “a single True Tree of Life” is not compatible (ie, is incompatible) with Darwin’s idea “a single True Phylogeny of Life”, but that there instead must be several True Trees of Life if there are any True Trees of Life at all, ie, if there is a True Phylogeny of Life. The cladistic idea of “a single True Tree of Life” is actually a paradoxical contradiction (meaning that it is an infinite recursion when searching it).

(A consistent classification of Darwin’s idea is instead an orthogonal system of classification, like the Linnean systematics (and thus also evolutionary taxonomy), because it keeps “entities”, “classes” and “categories”, and thus also “ancestors” and “descendants”, consistently apart).