Foundations of systematics and biogeography

Davi d M.William s

Malt e C . Ebac h

Foundation s o f

Biogeograph y

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Davi d M . William s • Malt e C . Ebac h

Foundation s o f Systematic s

a n d Biogeograph y

Forewor d b y Garet h Nelso n

DAI HCG TI'AI NdUYEH

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David M. Williams Make C. Ebach

Dept. Botany Botanischer Garten und

Natural History Museum Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem

Cromwell Road Freie Universitat Berlin

London SW7 5BD Konigin-Luise-Str. 6-8

United Kingdom 14191 Berlin

Germany

ISBN: 978-0-387-72728-8 e-ISBN: 978-0-387-72730-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007938218

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Dedicated to

Agnes Arber (1879-1960)

Adolf Naef (1883-1949)

Leon Croizat (1894-1982)

Lars Brundin (1907-1993)

Rainer Zangerl (1912-2004)

Colin Patterson (1933-1998)

Ronald H. Brady (1937-2003)

Forewor d

"But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of

understanding?"

Job 28: 12

Where, indeed? Today in systematics and biogeography, DNA is revered as the

source of all. One reads for example of the "unlovable mass of nucleotide sequence

characters that are the foundation of virtually all well-supported phylogenetic trees"

(Palmer et al. 2004:1443); and "Much of the improved understanding derived from

new genetic data and allows us to date important evolutionary events and, in some

cases, to trace the actual geographic routes travelled by early peoples over the earth"

(Orr 2006:18). Such assessment says nothing of the long history of human effort in

systematics and biogeography, as if that were now rendered irrelevant by modern

biology and its techniques of reading DNA sequences and of their computer-assisted

phylogenetic analysis.

Two generations ago palaeontology was similarly revered. Then one could read

for example that for mammals "Their fossil record is unequalled and allows an

almost magical view into the past" (Darlington 1957:320; reaffirmed by Briggs

1974:249). Today's attitude towards DNA is much the same except that there is

no "almost" about it. A lesson from the past, a sense of proportion widely over￾looked, is Blackwelder's (1977:115) dictum that "New types of data are potentially

of great importance, but they do not replace other types except in problem cases."

His perspective grew from consideration of overblown claims offered for the "new

kinds of data" of his time: chromosomes, behaviour, serology, genetics, a list that

today would be augmented by organelles, membranes, nucleic and amino acids,

genomics, proteomics, etc. Even so, the abiding reality remains: "there is no such

thing as magic." And, alas, to Job's queries there are no easy answers.

In 1813 AP de Candolle observed (p. 68) that in earlier times "the plant that

one botanist considered related to some other would later be far removed from it

by another botanist, with neither opinion capable of being proven either true or

false." For this dilemma he saw the remedy to be "the natural method," which took

all characters into consideration and relied on character congruence for support

of one opinion and refutation of another. His view prevails to the present, but its

focus was improved by Hennig's (1949) distinction between primitive and advanced

vii

viii Foreword

characters - his plesio- and apomorphies - that is the basis of the modern discussion

of cladistics.

The present volume broadens the discussion by incorporating the pre-Hennigian

German literature from Goethe, Haeckel, Naef et al. - what in the anglophonic world

is usually dismissed as the romanticism of "German idealistic morphology" (Levit

and Meister 2006). Through the ageless eyes of the "modern synthesis" the broad￾ening must seem to approach Marx's (1852) apotheosis of The Past: "The tradition

of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" - Die

Tradition alter toten Geschlecter lastet wie ein Alp aufdem Gehirne der Lebenden.

Nightmares notwithstanding, nothing for long, it seems, can safely be ignored.

References

Blackwelder, RE. 1977. Twenty five years of taxonomy. Systematic Zoology 26:107-137.

Briggs, JC. 1974. Operation of zoogeographic barriers. Systematic Zoology 23:248-256.

Candolle, AP de. 1813. Theorie elementaire de la botanique, ou esposition des principes de la

classification naturelle et de Part de decrier et d'etudier les vegetaux. Ddterville, Paris.

Darlington, PJ, Jr. 1957. Zoogeography: The geographical distribution of animals. John Wiley &

Sons, Inc., New York.

Hennig, W. 1949. Zur Klarung einiger Begriffe der phylogenetishcen Systematik. Forschungen und

Fortschritte 25:136-138.

Levit, GS, and K Meister. 2006. The history of essentialism vs. Ernst Mayr's "Essentialism Story":

A case study of German idealistic morphology. Theory in Biosciences 124:281-307.

Marx, K. 1852. Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon. Die Revolution, Eine Zeitschrift in zwan￾glosen Heften, ersten Hefte. New York.

Palmer, JD, DE Soltis, and MW Chase. 2004. The plant tree of life: An overview and some points

of view. American Journal of Botany 91:1437-1445.

Orr, HA. 2006. Talking genes, (review of "Before the Dawn: Recovering the lost history of our

ancestors," by Nicolas Wade). The New York Review of Books 53, September 21:18-22,

Gareth Nelson

School of Botany

University of Melbourne

Victoria 3010

Australia