There is one more thing about ‘Nature’ style descriptions that I want to address here that that affects more than just the highest ranked journals, (though they are the hardest hit / most culpable depending on your interpretation), and that is the pressure for descriptions of new taxa to be accompanied by cladistic analyses. Now let us get on thing clear right off, I love cladistics and I consider myself a cladist. As a tool for biological (and beyond as it happens) research, it is an extremely useful and powerful one and its correct use can add enormously to a description (by placing the organism in it’s correct phylogenetic context) and is generally useful for all kinds of evolutionary things.
However, it is a complex and difficult method to get to grips with. On the face of it, it is simple, assemble anatomical character descriptions, code them, run the program, print the tree. But that simple description masks a huge number of subtleties, complexities and details that take a long time to master and many simple mistakes can wreck an otherwise good analysis and render the results incorrect and effectively meaningless (by the way if you are horribly lost at this point, cladistics is the method used to create those evolutionary trees you see everywhere that show how taxa are related to one another). I consider myself a competent cladist only – I took more than one course as an undergraduate and masters student on the topic, cladistics formed a large part of my PhD research, and I have published several papers that include cladistic analyses, I have experimented with methods a little and taught the odd lecture on the subject. I would be happy to provide a phylogenetic analysis with a new taxon I was describing provided I was familiar with the anatomy of the clade in question and recent phylogenies based on (I did this for Fodonyx), but I am in the minority. Cladistics, despite its apparent simplicity is a tricky bugger and is rarely taught beyond the most basic principles (there are not many cladists out there), yet poorly conceived and poorly executed phylogenies are regularly and needlessly tacked onto descriptions, and this seems to be more common with the higher ranking journals who seem to pressure unwilling authors into including them.
Continue reading ‘Unnecessary Cladistics’
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