Rating: 
Summary: Potentially profound shift in the way we view living things
Review: This is a simple introduction to cladistics, the classification of species according to ecological relationships rather than superficial similarities or presumed position on an evolutionary tree of descent. Cladistic analysis is popular among supporters because it provides a testable way to study the relationship between species, an alternative to evolutionary story-telling for a story we were not around to witness and may never be able to reconstruct well enough from fossils.Why is this important ? For one, it makes the definition of species potentially a more rigorously scientific affair. For another, it doesn't rely on what some critics of evolutionary theory correctly characterize as unfalsifiable wild guesses about trees of descent. Finally, it potentially yields some rapprochement between the more reasonable proponents of creationism and critics of evolutionary theory and some of the less severe Darwinists. This is because it doesn't require us to guess at whether we share a common ancestor with apes, it provides a scientific program for testing relationships by parsimony. For this reason, it has been cited positively by critics of evoluton such as Phillip Johnson (Darwin on Trial) and Michael Denton (in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, though far less critical of much of evolution in Nature's Destiny). On the other hand, cladistics assumes common origins of species (at least those within a given cladogram !), which makes it anaethma to the aspect of creationism which requires belief in special creation rather than just opposing the seeming meaningless and random contingency in nature that opponents of Darwinism see it representing. An understanding and acceptance of cladistics not only heralds a revolution within biology, but potentially wider culture as well, as we would come to look at the relationship between living things in a new light. Cladistics allows us to learn from the common characteristics of closely related species without having to assume that a particular evolutionary process or path got them there, and without having to guess about the relationship of species outside the cladogram. This looks on the surface like an obscure issue in biological taxonomy with little relation to culture, but the essence of the idea is profound in its implications. Given this, Gee presents an understated account of what could well be a very important in both scientific and political-social debates over biology as it is taught in the future. That said, this will disappoint biologists and biology students, who having already been exposed to the idea of cladistics will find little new or original here. This book is however a very good first exposure.
| 
