Towards a Post-Cladistic Biological Systematics: Some Conceptual-Historical Reflections

The article discusses the current state and a supposed nearest future of biological systematics based on the contemporary conceptualism perspective. The conceptual development of systematics is considered as a “historical pendulum” following two pairs of major trends, the unification–diversification and integrative–reductional. It is emphasized that systematics develops and operates within a certain cognitive situation shaped by a specific onto-epistemic framework. Its historical development is affected by the dynamics of general scientific-philosophical “environment” and involves its structuration due to the diversification of partial taxonomic theories and research programs implementing them. The onto-epistemic framework of currently dominating cladistics, particularly specified as “new phylogenetics,” fits the reductional (formalization) trend due to the incorporation of some essential provisions of positivist philosophy of science. Its pretension of being the “most objective” and “really evolutionary” taxonomic school is conceptually untenable. The next move of “historical pendulum” is supposed to be framed by the conceptual philosophy of science, which will strengthen the integrative (biologization) trend and give rise to a post-cladistic systematics. Its ontology will be based on the phylo–evo–devo conception and imply a broad understanding of both (a) phylogeny as an ordered process of diversification of ontogenetic patterns of organisms, in which parallelisms are no less significant than divergences, and (b) phylogenetic pattern as an encaptic hierarchy of holo- and paraphyletic groups characterized by both the unity of origin and biological specifics. All this will make the next-generation systematics biologically and evolutionarily most sound.