[THERE'S been a storm in a test-tube about…]
Socialist Organiser1981 1981-09-03Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 15 →
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THERE'S been a storm in a test-tube about the way evolution takes place over the last year, kicked off by a letter to Nature from Prof. L.B. Halstead of Reading University accusing the National History Museum of promoting cladistics in their exhibition on the evolution of dinosaurs.
So what? Well, according to Halstead, cladistics not only supports creationism (i.e. that all life was specially created for the occasion by God and has not changed since) but also espouses an essentially "Marxist" view that all evolution has occurred in sudden "revolutions" rather than by gradual reforms. Not bad, eh?
Cladistics is a technique for working out how closely related species of animals or plants are.
The word comes from the Greek word klados, meaning branch or group and the technique relies on dividing species into groups or clades in which all the members share at least one feature not shared by any other clade and have a common ancestor not shared by any other species.
It is assumed 1) that species are related (1.e. that life evolved once only on this planet), that each species has a nearest relative and 2) that none of the species considered is the ancestor of any of the other species.
Poor old Halstead thinks that this means that no species can evolve into any other species.
Cladists however say that they assume that new species