Some dangerous trends, and a hope for the future

Abstract

The preceding chapters should convince the reader that systematists were not uniformly successful until they consciously began developing phylogenetic methods. Unfortunately, there is often a hiatus between the theoreticians who discuss the nature of species and homology, and the specialists working on a given group of animals, plants, or fungi. The gap between the frontiers of pure research and the application of principles is still very large, and there are several reasons for it. Some reasons are of a contingent nature, and can be easily avoided. Others are much more deeply entrenched in our ways of working, and I cannot see an easy way of changing the current state of affairs. In my view, several theoretical papers are developed by people with experience narrowly restricted to a single group and their attempts to generalize are always dangerous. However, still harder to overcome are other, more subtle difficulties, derived from an unconscious and uncritical reliance on traditional methods, which is widespread among systematists. This is possibly the cause of the largest number of problems within systematics.

The present classification of birds amounts to little more than superstition and bears about so much relationship to a true phylogeny of the class as Greek mythology does to the theory of relativity.

S.L. Olson (1981, p.193)