21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cladistics without confusions, July 30, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Biological Systematics: Principles and Applications (Comstock Books) (Hardcover)
At last we have the first condense and well written treatment on Cladistics for English speakers. Phylogenetic systematics or Cladistics is a young field relative to the more than 200 years of taxonomic history. The pioneers textbooks on the subject (e.g., Nelson and Platnick, Wiley), although excellent, appeared at the beginning of the eighties and reflect the turbulent history of systematics during the late sixties and most of the seventies. The rapid maturation of the field during the next decade rendered these books quickly out of date regarding methods of analysis (the conceptual framework is still as fresh as ever). Other edited textbooks in English appeared at the beginning of the nineties, but their lack of condensation and consistency and their often lack of critical evaluation made them even dangerous for students trying to learn the subject. R. T. Schuh book comes to the rescue of students trying to become good systematists. The book summarizes and condenses the various topics of Cladistics without loosing important details. It also stresses the place of phylogenetic studies inside general biological taxonomic practices, debunking the myth that you must either construct phylogenies or work on taxonomy and nomenclature. Every student of biology must read this book.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great for the right reader., May 7, 2004
This review is from: Biological Systematics: Principles and Applications (Comstock Books) (Hardcover)
Systematics is the art, the science, and the ongoing debate of assigning organisms to phylogenetic groups. If you're from bioinformatics, you may think, "Oh. Tree-building." This book is much more fundmental: it talks about the biological data and philosophical approach needed for any kind of organization. This book informs the beliefs behind your choice of algorithms and data to involve.
Modern bioinformaticists usually assume that tree-building moves forward from DNA or protein strings. That blinds us to the 200 years of classification based on physical features, behavior, and even geographic distribution. In that time, huge numbers of debates have sprung up, too many to list here. A few caught my interest though. First, suppose that "all pterogyte insects have wings". The fight starts when an apparent pterogyte shows up with no wings. Personally, I don't see the problem. If having wings is a defining feature, then it's a non-pterogyte, mutations excepted. If having wings is a pattern we noticed but not part of the definition, then the pattern needs work. I'm not a taxonomist, though.
Another debate (p.53) is whether to accept parsimony, the principle of least mechanism, as a taxonomic tool. The objectors claim that it's suspect because of the assumptions behind it, whether or not anyone has "... stat[ed] precisely what the assumptions are." Well, someone may come up with an assumption some day, so we may as well get our objections in early.
This book is distinctly non-mathematical. I don't know all that much, but I do know to ask what background probability model is used to decide whether a similarity or difference matters. That was never mentioned explicitly, but was silently buried in half-page descriptions of jack-knifing and boot-strapping.
It's non-mathematical content is very valuable, though. Its glossary gives clear descriptions of subtly different terms. The chapter on nomenclature, the formal process of naming, was a real discovery for me. I had no idea that the rules were so elaborate.
Perhaps it's the nature of the field, but I was surprised at how few recent references appeared at the end of most chapters. I appreciate the classic papers, back to the 1900s. The 1970s were well represented. References from the 1990s, however, were startling when they did appear, since there were so very few of them. Considering the book's 2000 copyright date, the source material seemed older than I would have expected.
This won't give you any insight into algorithms or mathematical techniques, which disappointed me initially. Once I settled into the biological and historical insight that the book does give, though, I found it very enjoyable.
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