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Deep Time: Cladistics, The Revolution in Evolution
 
 

Deep Time: Cladistics, The Revolution in Evolution (Paperback)

by Henry Gee (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd; New edition edition (5 Mar 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1857029879
  • ISBN-13: 978-1857029871
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 770,539 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

For centuries biological scientists have been using the Linnean system of classification, organising hierarchies of life forms by their perceived similarities and differences. In the late 20th century, some scientists started using an alternative system called "cladistics", which bases taxonomic classifications on ecological relationships. Under the first system, all algae fall into a single large category, which is then subdivided into various genera and species; under the second, green algae are grouped with plants, chromophyte algae with waterborne fungi, and so forth to account for the environments in which they live. Under the first system, dogs and wolves and coyotes are separated; under the second, they are united, for, the thinking goes, similarities of behaviour and provenience are more important than mere lines of evolutionary descent, which can only be guessed at.

The debate over cladistics has largely been confined to seminar rooms and laboratories. Henry Gee brings it to the general public in this spirited look at how the science of palaeontology, that grand tour of what Gee calls Deep Time, is conducted. Replacing old family trees with "cladograms", Gee challenges long-accepted notions about the past (for example, the classification of Archaeopteryx, which walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but is accounted for as a dinosaur) and argues for a return to rigour in testing hypotheses. His book, although about difficult issues, is immediately accessible, and readers seeking to learn something about cladistics--which Gee believes is "a revolution in thought as profound as that of Darwinian evolution by natural selection"--are off to a fine start in these pages. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Review

This book will surprise, outrage and delight you - and make you think.' Jared Diamond 'Gee takes the reader inside contemporary palaeontology, from the excitement of a fossil dig with Maeve Leakey to the thousands of carefully stored and catalogued specimens at the Natural History Museum.' New Scientist 'As Gee's brilliant analysis shows, viewed afresh, evolution proves a more interesting and exciting - if more complex - story than we ever thought.' Scotsman

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading for would-be scientists, 29 Jun 2008
By C. Dixon "Uomo universale" (Devon, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
A little slow to get going - you think that Gee might have been attending a few too many Creative Writing courses. (Why do popular science authors think that every miniscule detail of their field trips is fascinating or relevant to the science?) It's worth the wait however, as this is a very clear explanation for the average person of the aims of cladistics, with some detailed discussions as applied to the fish/tetrapod relationship, birds/dinosaurs, and the hominids.

Gee reminds us that a scientific hypothesis should be testable, a precept virtually forgotten by today's disingenuous science in which total conjecture is always being handed down to us as incontrovertible fact. Contrary to the long-standing viewpoint of palaeontologists and evolutionary biologists, cladistics argues that any temporal or causal link between any fossil and any other fossil or any living species simply cannot be proven - they are after all dead and gone; the best we can do is create bifurcating "cladograms" indicating some sort of inferred relationship, without any temporal axis.

Some of the discussion of birds contained herein may well require a rewrite with the recent exposure of some Chinese bird fossils as fakes. Also, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a book like this really ought to contain some pictures of fossils and anatomical drawings to explain the points made in the text - there are none at all.

Despite such faults, this book should be required reading for anyone intending to embark upon a scientific career - this is what science should be about. Let's get back to our scientific roots.
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Lost in Deep Time, 13 April 2000
By paul.carline@virgin.net (Near Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews
Henry Gee's "Deep Time" is, if you will excuse the pun, a most timely book. Over the past ten years or so we have been treated to an increasingly rich diet of 'evolutionary' explanations for almost every conceivable human physical and psychological attribute on the basis of a highly speculative and scientifically untenable interpretation of the role of genes, inspired to a large extent by what biology professor Brian Goodwin termed the "absurd and degenerate concept" of the so-called 'selfish gene'.

If, as Henry Gee states, most professional palaeontologists "rejected the story-telling mode of evolutionary history as unscientific more than 30 years ago', then the appearance of a book about cladistics - the subject of "Deep Time" - is long overdue. Cladistics is the science of relationships based on verifiable attributes, as gleaned from comparative anatomy, physiology and embryology, from palaeontology and recently also from the comparison of gene sequences in plants and animals.

Such studies, in the view of cladists such as Gee, lead only to patterns of kinship - degrees of closeness of relationship based on observable features of structure and form. Any interpretation or extrapolation of such data to generate evolutionary lineages - lines of descent - is unscientific and therefore invalid. Such narratives of human or animal evolution are just that - stories invented to satisfy subjective prejudices about our place in nature, in particular about the presumed inevitable upward progression of evolution. "Deep Time", the 4.5 billion-year history of the Earth, and the extraordinary sparsity of the fossil record allow no valid conclusions to be drawn about how or why evolution occurred.

Cladistics claims to be an objective scientific method primarily on the basis that it is testable. Yet Gee admits that the test applied by cladists - Occam's Razor or the Principle of Parsimony - is unreliable and can never reveal the truth, which Gee says is unknowable. We are therefore left hanging in the void. We are told that 'almost everything we have been told about evolution is wrong', that we must abandon the stories of a progressive evolutionary process leading to Man, but we are given instead a scientific method which has nothing to say about the 'how' or 'why' of evolution and which is in any case apparently unreliable.

There is a further paradox. If the objective facts studied by cladists can say nothing about the how or why, then they can neither confirm nor deny Darwin's theory. Gee seems strangely ambivalent about this, at times acceping the lack of proof for Darwinism, at others using the assumption of the fact of natural selection to make his case e.g. when he simply asserts that evolution (because it is Darwinian) can have no direction or purpose.

Cladistics should nonetheless be welcomed. It has potential - if objectively pursued - to cut through the pseudo-science which currently bedevils evolution theory. It can help us towards a clearer view of our place in nature - but only if it is genuinely open to ALL the facts.

There is a kind of sub-plot to "Deep Time", in which Gee joins those who feel the need to knock humans off any kind of imagined pedestal, to reduce us to an insignificant accident of cosmic history. Bipedality, the manufacture and use of tools, language, intelligence, creativity and self-consciousness are all dismised as 'really not very special'. One has to ask if this is an objective assessment of the facts, unprejudiced by personal preferences and why it is that Gee fails to mention those facts of comparative embryology and anatomy which tell a very different story of evolution from the Darwinian one.

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