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Representations of the Natural System in the Nineteenth century (1991)

O'Hara, Robert J.

Springer

Biology and philosophy 6 (1991), S. 255-274

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ISSN: 1572-8404

Schlagwort(e): Classification ; diagrams ; evolution ; history ; natural history ; natural system ; ornithology ; phylogeny ; representation ; systematics ; taxonomy

Quelle: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000

Thema: Biologie , Philosophie

Notizen: Abstract ‘The Natural System’ is the abstract notion of the order in living diversity. The richness and complexity of this notion is revealed by the diversity of representations of the Natural System drawn by ornithologists in the Nineteenth Century. These representations varied in overall form from stars, to circles, to maps, to evolutionary trees and cross-sections through trees. They differed in their depiction of affinity, analogy, continuity, directionality, symmetry, reticulation and branching, evolution, and morphological convergence and divergence. Some representations were two-dimensional, and some were three-dimensional; n-dimensional representations were discussed but never illustrated. The study of diagrammatic representations of the Natural System is made difficult by the frequent failure of authors to discuss them in their texts, and by the consequent problem of distinguishing features which carried meaning from arbitrary features and printing conventions which did not. Many of the systematics controversies of the last thirty years have their roots in the conceptual problems which surrounded the Natural System in the late 1800s, problems which were left unresolved when interest in higher-level systematics declined at the turn of this century.

Materialart: Digitale Medien

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02426840

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Digitale Medien

Telling the tree: Narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history (1992)

O'Hara, Robert J.

Springer

Biology and philosophy 7 (1992), S. 135-160

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ISSN: 1572-8404

Schlagwort(e): Cladistics ; classification ; evolutionary history ; narrative ; natural history ; natural system ; philosophy of history ; philosophy of science ; phylogeny ; progress ; systematics ; tree thinking ; tree topology

Quelle: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000

Thema: Biologie , Philosophie

Notizen: Abstract Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt “tree thinking”, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life.

Materialart: Digitale Medien

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00129880

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