Ronald Brady and the cladists

Abstract

Ronald Brady was the first philosopher to defend pattern cladistics as an independent scientific field. That independence was achieved through the decoupling of biological systematics from phylogenetics––that is, inferred evolutionary processes (e.g. character transformation). Brady saw parallels between biological systematics and Wolfgang von Goethe's Morphology, an empirical scientific field that incorporates human observation and perception to discover coherent morphological structures. Goethe's Morphology and pre‐Darwinian systematics were independent from evolutionary narratives, a tradition that continued into the 20th Century through the work of biologists such as Agnes Arber. Most importantly, Brady provided the philosophical and historical foundations to an independent systematics by demonstrating the links between phenomenology, Goethe's Morphology and comparative biology.

When phylogenetics met biogeography: Willi Hennig, Lars Brundin and the roots of phylogenetic and cladistic biogeography

“…The emphasis on patterns rather than processes is a basic feature of the approach known as “pattern cladistics” ( e.g . Brady, 1982; Ebach and Williams, 2020; Nelson, 2014; Platnick, 1979). In this respect, the progression and deviation rules refer to processes, whereas vicariance refers to a pattern.…”