2014
DOI: 10.1071/sb14025
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Popper and phylogenetics, a misguided rendezvous

Abstract: Abstract. Popper's falsificationism is frequently referred to as a general normative reference system in phylogenetics. Referring to falsificationism, phylogeneticists have made four central claims, including that frequency probabilities (1) cannot be used for inferring degrees of corroboration and (2) cannot be used in phylogenetics because phylogeny is a unique process, (3) likelihood methods represent verificationist approaches, and (4) the congruence test is a Popperian test. However, these claims are inco… Show more

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Cited by 3 publications
(4 citation statements)
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“…These questions have largely subsided from the journals of biological systematics, but they continue to crop up in the writings of philosophers and historians of biology. Interested readers can refer to the useful summaries and analyses of this literature by Hull () and Vogt ().…”
Section: The Revolution Beginsmentioning
confidence: 99%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…These questions have largely subsided from the journals of biological systematics, but they continue to crop up in the writings of philosophers and historians of biology. Interested readers can refer to the useful summaries and analyses of this literature by Hull () and Vogt ().…”
Section: The Revolution Beginsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…A cladogram forbids nothing to happen, because biological theory gives us no grounds for expecting that the next character we look at will fit the pattern inferred from its predecessors, or that synapomorphies will ultimately outnumber or outweigh other sorts of resemblances in our data set. As the German systematist Lars Vogt () writes, “a given tree, in combination with descent with modification as background knowledge, does not prohibit any specific character‐state distribution … As a consequence … cladograms are not falsifiable in principle and thus not testable in a Popperian sense.”…”
Section: A Scientific Revolution?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“… Popper's philosophy of science has been discussed extensively within systematics (see, for example, Gattei, ; Rieppel, ,b; Vogt, , ; Kluge, ; Crother and Murray, and references therein) and diverse scientific disciplines (e.g., Hansson, ; Persson, ). We are aware of some of the alleged shortcomings of Popper's position that, according to some authors, render Popper's falsificationism fatally flawed (e.g., Vogt, ).…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“… Popper's philosophy of science has been discussed extensively within systematics (see, for example, Gattei, ; Rieppel, ,b; Vogt, , ; Kluge, ; Crother and Murray, and references therein) and diverse scientific disciplines (e.g., Hansson, ; Persson, ). We are aware of some of the alleged shortcomings of Popper's position that, according to some authors, render Popper's falsificationism fatally flawed (e.g., Vogt, ). Nevertheless, we are also aware that several theoretical components tightly related to Popper's philosophy of science, such as simplicity, unification and maximization of explanatory power, have been repeatedly recognized as epistemological virtues of scientific explanations (Farris, ; Koertge, ; Norton, ; Baker, ), and as such, we consider that Popper's () characterization of scientific criticism, which allowed him to criticize the inductive logic and establish his demarcation criterion, is an extremely useful tool to consider in the epistemological debate. …”
mentioning
confidence: 99%