Abstract
Classification is a central endeavor in every scientific field of work. Classification in biology, however, is distinct from classification in other fields of science in a number of ways. Thus, understanding how biological classification works is an important element in understanding the nature of biological science. In the present paper, I discuss a number of philosophical issues that are characteristic for classification in biological science, paying special attention to questions related to science education. My aims are (1) to provide science educators and others concerned with the teaching of biology with an accessible overview of the philosophy of biological classification and (2) to show how knowledge of the philosophy of classification can play an important role in science teaching.
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Notes
But, as a reviewer pointed out, the claim that classifications are scientific theories did not originate with Mayr but with philosopher of science Karl Popper, whose views have exerted a considerable influence on biological systematists.
For my part, though, I’m not sure whether there is more at stake here than just terminology.
Note that Mayr repeatedly also stated that a main aim of classification is to construct groups over which a great many generalizations are possible (Mayr 1981, p. 511; 1982, p. 149), a view that was already held by several prominent nineteenth-century biologists and philosophers (e.g., Thomas Henry Huxley, William Whewell and John Stuart Mill). However, this should not be seen as a third role of biological classification, besides the roles of information storage-and-retrieval and representing the state of affairs in nature, but as an aspect of classification where these two roles coalesce. For a classificatory system that adequately reflects relevant aspects of the state of affairs in nature (in the case of the classification of organisms, common descent) will also be a system that is the most useful for information storage and retrieval. As Mayr put it, “members of a taxon, sharing a common heritage as descendants from a common ancestor, will have more characters in common with each other than with species not so related” (Mayr 1982, p. 149).
As will be obvious, I only consider the Western tradition in this paper.
As a reviewer pointed out, the idea of a scala naturae itself originated around 1550, not with Aristotle, and was based upon Aristotle’s ideas.
“None of Darwin’s theories was accepted as enthusiastically as common descent; it is probably correct to say that no other of Darwin’s theories had such enormous immediate explanatory power.” (Mayr 2004, p. 101). See also footnote 11 below.
Phylogenetic systematics began in the 1960s (O’Hara 1997, p. 323) and much of its fundamental ideas, terminology and methodology can be traced back to the seminal work of Hennig (1950, 1965, 1966). Note that many phylogenetic systematists do not think of systematics as a classificatory enterprise—see Sect. 3.1 for discussion.
The general idea is that if inferences from different data sets obtained from different kinds of cases independently support the same theory or hypothesis—or more precisely, if a theory or hypothesis is supported by inferences from data pertaining to a different kind of cases than the cases on which the hypothesis was built in the first place—, this congruence of inferences adds strong support to the theory or hypothesis. This idea can be traced back to the famous nineteenth-century philosopher and polymath William Whewell, who introduced it under the term ‘consilience of inductions’ (e.g., Snyder 2009). Whewell put it thus: “the evidence in favour of our induction is of a much higher and more forcible character when it enables us to explain and determine cases of a kind different from those which were contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis. The instances in which this have occurred, indeed, impress us with a conviction that the truth of our hypothesis is certain” (Whewell quoted in Snyder 2009, Sect. 3). With respect to scientific classifications, particular classifications can be thought of as hypotheses about the state of affairs in the world. In cases in which the same classification of the entities under study fits data sets obtained from different kinds of analyses, this can be seen as support for the classification in line with Whewell’s idea of ‘consilience of inductions’.
To be sure, ontologies of this kind are not exclusive to biology—consider for example the technological disciplines.
As another example, Walsh (2006, p. 430) recently argued that “Aristotle’s essentialism … should be seen as an explanatory doctrine, rather than a taxonomic one.” That is, in its early stages systematics wasn’t a classificatory enterprise and thus doesn’t necessarily encompass classification. Consider also the remark on the website of the Tree of Life project, which aims to construct an online accessible and searchable Tree of Life, that “The Tree of Life project is about organismal diversity and the phylogeny that generated it. It is not about classification” (see http://tolweb.org/tree/learn/concepts/classification.html, accessed January 4th, 2011).
A discussion of this issue can be found in Wilkins (forthcoming).
According to Mayr (1982, pp. 505–510; 1985, 1997, pp. 177–192; 2004, pp. 97–115), Darwin’s account of evolution does not constitute a single theory. Rather, Mayr suggested, in the Origin of Species Darwin actually presented five independent theories of organismal evolution: the theory of evolution as such (i.e., the claim that evolution in fact occurs), the theory of common descent (i.e., the theory that all life can be traced back to a single common ancestor), the theory of the multiplication of species (i.e., the theory that the number of species isn’t constant but that new species come into being during the course of evolution), the theory of gradualism (i.e., the claim that evolution does not proceed in jumps, but that change is gradual) and the theory of natural selection (i.e., that natural selection is the principal mechanism by which evolution occurs). The theories of common descent and of natural selection constituted Darwin’s great innovative contributions to biological theory; the other three theories were already held by several of his predecessors. Whether or not from the perspective of philosophy of science these should be understood as theories (or as epistemic entities of a different kind) is an issue that cannot be addressed here; it is, however, important to note that they constitute distinct elements of Darwin’s account that can be endorsed or rejected independently of one another (Mayr 1982, p. 506; 2004, p. 98; cf. also Waters 2003, pp. 117–119, for the argument that the ideas of natural selection, common descent and evolution as such (or the transmutation of species) are logically independent from one another).
As a reviewer noted, this view of classification was also widely held long before the acceptance of evolutionary theory. Thus, while it is not unique to biological classification after Darwin, it is an issue that phylogenetic systematics needs to confront.
Note that there are phylogenetic trees that do include information about evolutionary time, expressed in the length of the vertical lines. Not all trees include such information, however.
Cladistics is at any rate the best organized of the various lines of work in systematics with its own professional society, the Willi Hennig Society (http://www.cladistics.org/) and its own journal, Cladistics. For an excellent history of the heated debates between (and within) the various systematic schools of thought, see Hull (1988). Note that some authors (e.g., Wiley 1981, p. 6; Baum and Offner 2008, p. 222) use ‘cladistics’ and ‘phylogenetic systematics’ as synonyms, while others (including me) use ‘phylogenetic systematics’ to denote the general field of work that aims at reconstructing evolutionary history in the form of tree-like diagrams, and ‘cladistics’ (encompassing at least ‘pattern cladistics’ and ‘process’ cladistics’) and ‘evolutionary systematics’ as the names of different schools of thought within that field of work.
This might be connected to several elements often included in the nature of science. For example, it connects to the notion of the tentativeness of scientific knowledge, which if often taken as one of the core elements of the nature of science (Elby and Hammer 2001; Osborne et al. 2003; Lederman et al. 2002; Lederman 2007; McComas 2008; Schwartz and Lederman 2008; Kampourakis and McComas 2010). However, tentativeness is not a distinctive feature of scientific knowledge: all knowledge, be it scientific knowledge or knowledge produced in everyday contexts, is tentative, so it doesn’t seem particularly useful to take the tentativeness of knowledge as a key feature of the nature of science (Van Dijk, forthcoming). It also connects to another element of the nature of science, namely that “[o]bservations, ideas and conclusions in science are not entirely objective” (Kampourakis and McComas 2010, p. 638; see also McComas 2008).
This is a first-order approach to circumscribing the nature of chemistry as a domain of science found in dictionaries and chemistry textbooks (e.g., Bodner and Pardue 1995, p. 1). As it turns out, however, the question what chemistry is ultimately about is more difficult to answer (see Schummer 2010, pp. 165–169).
But clearly this is not so for all chemical kinds. Some kinds, such as acid and base, are functional kinds defined in terms of the function that their member entities perform in the context of chemical reactions.
For a brief discussion of ecological kinds, see Mikkelson (2003).
For an expanded Linnaean hierarchy encompassing 21 levels, see Ereshefsky (2001, p. 213).
For overviews of the philosophical problem of natural kinds, see Dupré (1993, Chapter 1; 2000), Wilkerson (1988, 1995, 1998), Bird and Tobin (2008) or Koslicki (2008). See Hacking (1991) and McOuat (2009) for the view that the doctrine of natural kinds has originated only in the nineteenth century and cannot be traced back to Plato and Aristotle.
I am, however, skeptical of that view, because many of the central laws of natural science don’t seem to be about those groupings that are usually considered to be natural kinds. Newton’s law of gravitation, for example, is about things with mass and Ohm’s law is about things with electric resistance. While some authors, such as Churchland (1985), conclude for this that there are only very few natural kinds (such as the kind things-with-mass), I’m not prepared to draw this consequence.
And not only do different authors hold different views of what the problem is, they also sometimes disagree on how far it can be traced back through the history of biology. According to Wilkins (2009a, pp. 168–173), for example, the species problem traces back to seminal publications by William Bateson from 1894 and E.B. Poulton from 1903, before which there was no species problem. McOuat (2001, pp. 613, 639–641) argued that the species problem only really arose in the early stages of the Modern Synthesis in the 1920 s. According to Grene and Depew, in contrast, “it is certainly the case that since 1859 [i.e., since Darwin’s Origin of Species] there has been a rampant ‘species problem’” (2004, p. 292). And according to Mayr, writing in 1957, the problem goes back even further: “Few biological problems have remained as consistently challenging through the past two centuries as the species problem” (Mayr 1957, p. iii). Good book-length discussions of the species problem are Wilson (1999), Hey (2001), Stamos (2003), Wilkins (2009a) and Richards (2010). Brief discussions can be found in Mayr (1982, pp. 251–297; 2004, pp. 171–193), Dupré (1993, pp. 37–60), Reydon (2004, 2005), (Grene and Depew 2004, pp. 291–306), Kearney (2007, pp. 222–225) and Ereshefsky (2010a, b).
As such, what authors tend to call species concepts in fact aren’t distinct concepts, but rather distinct candidate definitions of one and the same scientific concept, namely ‘species’. For this point, see also Wilkins (2011).
Moreover, the diversity of species concepts is commonly treated as an advanced-level topic in biology teaching: in my experience, even Bachelor- and Masters-level university students of biology aren’t typically introduced to the various available species concepts, but only learn Mayr’s BSC and perhaps one or two other prominent species concepts. At high-school level, then, it seems overly ambitious to address the topic.
It is a homonym rather than a term with respect to which a pluralistic attitude is appropriate, because in my view there is nothing that unites the four meanings under an overarching idea of “speciesness”, except for their common descent. See Reydon (2005) for discussion.
Accordingly, a comparatively recent movement in biological systematics advocates rank-free classification, i.e., the abolishment of using the traditional levels of the Linnaean hierarchy to rank various groups (see http://www.ohio.edu/phylocode/). The species rank, however, is retained in such classifications as the basis of biological classification.
I have no data on how widespread the practice is in school teaching of first introducing organismal diversity from a morphological perspective before considering evolution. At least it seems not uncommon: see, for example, Kattmann (1995, p. 35) for the situation in Germany or Nickels and Nelson’s (2005, p. 283) observation that “perhaps the most common […] approach in teaching about biological classification uses the [morphological—T.R.] arrangement of manufactured objects (hardware, furniture, whatever) in an attempt to illustrate the principles of biological classification.”
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Kostas Kampourakis and John Wilkins for helpful comments on drafts of this paper, and to Sabina Leonelli for bringing the view of Claude Bernard to my attention by means of a recent paper of hers (Leonelli 2010).
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Reydon, T.A.C. Classifying Life, Reconstructing History and Teaching Diversity: Philosophical Issues in the Teaching of Biological Systematics and Biodiversity. Sci & Educ 22, 189–220 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9366-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9366-z