Re: Article: On Phylogenetic Trees

<anon1@xxxxxxx> wrote:

(First attempt to post this failed, trying again...)
Lamarck also had a tree of life, earlier.

It's my understanding that neither Lamarck nor Darwin had *a* single
tree of life, rather each had multiple trees of life, with Lamarck's
trees comprising very small clades (one genus, or one family many
genera), while Darwin's trees comprised larger clades. Furthermore
Lamarck believed firmly that evolution was strictly segregated within
these family groups, whereas Darwin allowed for the possibility of a
single all-inclusive clade or at least a very small number of master
clades.

Lamarck's trees are not historical, but possible trajectories any single
monad can trace in its development up the ladder of complexity. Each
"species" is just a lineage of a developing monad, and some
perturbations may end up making it a whale instead of a man.

The first trees for historical, as opposed to formal or developmental,
sequences were developed by Bronn in 1856 or so, apart from Darwin's
much earlier but unpublished ones in the notebook and the Big Species
Book.
.....

Lamarck did come (after some resistance) to a tree of life, fifty years
before Darwin.

So it's no wonder he didn't go so radical as Darwin later did. What
Lamarck proposed was radical for his time, and apparently the French
later recanted it, even as the British continued to embrace it, and
then what Darwin proposed would have been a mortal sin in Lamarck's
time but was merely radical in his time, while Lamarck's proposal was
tame in Darwin's time, already well accepted everywhere, and *still*
accepted outside France.

Well, sort of. In France few were Lamarckians, some were the more
timeless Goethean-style Geoffroyans. And transmutation was identified as
a radical, in the political sense, view, so it was hardly widely
accepted in more staid established scientific circles.
.....

Lamarck was a really bright guy, and it's just that he didn't have
Malthus's shoulders to stand on as Darwin and Wallace did.

In no way would that have affected Lamarck. He was a materialist who
thought that a Buffonesque moulé interieur, or physical fluid of some
kind, drove creatures up the scala naturae. He would not have thought
that Malthusian restrictions were anything more than local perturbations
of that process (like Buffon, he thought that local stock was modified
directly by the action of climate, soil and geography, a view widely
held long before either of them).

I think
Malthus deserves half the credit for the theory of evolution by
competition per fitness and survival of the fittest, since he did the
ground work in the population dynamics whereby the Darwin/Wallace is
merely a corollary.

Well in that case give Adam Smith the credit. Or Smith's friend James
Hutton.

But Darwin and Wallace deserve a majority of the
credit for their groundwork in Galapagos and East Indies respectively
that led to the idea of largescale common descent and (see below)
abolition of the idea of fixed ideal forms.

.....
<http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/darwin_bio.htm>
Darwin thought in terms of populations of
diverse heritable things with no essence--not representatives of ideal
types as many earlier thinkers had done.

False false false. Nobody was an essentialist with respect to the
constitution of species before or after Darwin until the 1920s at the
earliest. And the "representatives of ideal types" was Platonism -
species had essences because they weren't real - and only Cuvier and
Agassiz made much of this, and not Cuvier all that strongly. Agassiz was
an eccentric in his times, and not the mode. Aristotelian influence was
weak for the three centuries before Darwin, and Darwin was not that
different, apart from accepting de Candolle's observations of the
ubiquity of variation within species, a poorly kept secret, as every
taxonomist knew of it.


I think this is the *key* mental frame shift (philosophical change)
that allowed Darwin to conceive of his theory, even after Malthus had
presented the groundwork for it. Did Wallace likewise undergo this
change in philosophical view from platonic ideals and representatives
thereof to the modern view of essenceless individual characters not
existing to satisfy any ideal type-character, and essenceless
individual critters likewise not existing to approximate any ideal
type?

Note that debates over whether Homo erectus is "a human", or Archy is
"a bird" or "a dinosaur", may be fallbacks to the old expired
ideal-type system of Plato.

(Caveat: I attribute two ideas to Plato: First the idea, in my opinion
totally worthless, that everything we see in nature is unreal, merely
an illusion, a shadow of perfect types which exist in ideal-space
beyond our ability to see them directly. Second the idea, in my opinion
valid for atomic physics but not for most aspects of biology, that
things can be classified into fixed categories with no overlap. I hope
readers aren't confused by my two different uses of "Platonic".)
..

Well Plato did not hold the first, at least not in his exoteric works,
and thought that (real) things in the corruptible world were imperfect
instances of the eternal and uncorruptible types of heaven. And it was
Aristotle who insisted that classes not overlap. Plato had no such
compunctions.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

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