Controversy
Willi Hennig's pioneering work provoked a spirited debate about the relative merits of phylogenetic nomenclature versus Linnaean taxonomy, or the related approach of evolutionary taxonomy, which has continued down to the present. Some of the debates in which the cladists were engaged had been running since the 19th century. While Hennig insisted that different classification schemes were useful for different purposes, he gave primacy to his own, claiming that the categories of his system had "individuality and reality" in contrast to the "timeless abstractions" of morphology-based classifications.
Formal classifications based on cladistic reasoning are said to emphasize ancestry at the expense of descriptive characteristics, and thus ignore biologically sensible, clearly defined groups which are not clades (e.g. reptiles as traditionally defined, or prokaryotes). Nonetheless, most taxonomists today avoid paraphyletic groups whenever they think it is possible within Linnaean taxonomy; polyphyletic taxa have long fallen out of fashion.
Read more about this topic: Phylogenetic Nomenclature
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)