Beyond Cladistics: A Festschrift for Prof C J Humphries


01-Oct-2008 - 03-Oct-2008

As an approach to the discovery of phylogenetic relationships among organisms, cladistics took the systematics community by storm. According to David Hull, in his 1988 account of its history, cladistics was winning out everywhere; according to Colin Patterson, cladistics “began in the late 1960s, accelerated in the 1970s, and was virtually complete by the eighties”; in contrast, Gareth Nelson suggested that cladistics is suffering from “Arrested Development”. This symposium, entitled Beyond Cladistics, in honour of botanist Chris Humphries, will address some general issues relating to cladistics: its past, its present and its future – if, indeed, there is anything beyond cladistics itself. [ more ]