Work

The nature of parsimony and instrumentalism in systematics

Year: 2007

Type: article

Abstract: This paper traces the historical and philosophical roots of the principle of parsimony, and its incorporation in empiricist philosophy of science. It is argued that phylogeny reconstruction looks back to the empiricist tradition in its application of parsimony. The radical coherentism that motivates the application of parsimony in direct optimization of sequence alignment results in an instrumentalist approach to phylogeny reconstruction. A similarly instrumentalist perspective motivated the ‘barcoding’ initiative in taxonomy and bioconservation. This is contrasted with a realist conception of systematics.

Source: Journal of Zoological Systematics & Evolutionary Research

DOI: 10.1111/j.1439-0469.2007.00426.x

Author: O. Rieppel

Institution: Field Museum of Natural History

Language: English

Topic: Philosophy and History of Science

Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funder: National Science Foundation

Awards: ATOL: Collaborative Research: The Deep Scaly Project: Resolving Squamate Phylogeny Using Genomic and Morphological Approaches, An Integrative Approach to the Problem of Snake Origins