Re: Systematics and Paleontology

["Thomas E. Yancey" <tey7004@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Comments about the role of systematics in paleontology appearing during the last
week reveal that systematics has a weak base among paleontologists and that it 
cannot be expected to maintain a central role in the future. Norm's query to 
paleonet elicted some strong affirmations of support for systematic study, but 
these affirmations noticeably came from persons engaged in biostratigraphic 
study. Persons whose primary focus is the determination of geologic time and 
correlation of rocks. For them, mastery of techniques of species determination 
is fundamental to effective work.

The absence of response from practitioners in other aspects of paleontology 
suggests that systematics is indeed, just one skill among the many skills we are
expected to apply. In most university programs, paleo teaching focuses on 
topical issues, training persons to be good commentators but not teaching them 
the tools needed to generate basic systematic data. In general, skills utilized 
in working with species (recognizing, identifying, and describing species) are 
picked up in an informal manner outside the set curriculum, as a by-product of 
having to work with fossil data or from a self-motivated, personal desire to 
learn about a group of organisms. All of us promote this trend when we encourage
students to work on "big picture" issues and discourage them from doing routine,
descriptive work, although it is often the case that much more descriptive work 
is needed to properly evaluate conclusions that have passed early testing. In 
evaluating a research proposal (at the thesis level as well as at national 
funding level), the ability to generate high quality taxonomic data is less 
important than having a well argued goal for addressing a conceptual problem.

If we hold to the belief that most of the basic descriptive work has already 
been done, or that the available descriptive work is adequate for testing the 
models we find interesting, there is little need to support systematic study. We
do tend to value the hypothesis more than the data-base. 

Systematics seems to have become subsumed within the theme of determining 
phylogeny. In the process, descriptive systematic study is being lost in the 
welter of debate on how best to portray degrees of relatedness among taxa. This 
philosophic quarrel inhibits workers from doing routine systematic work and 
raises questions about the proper procedures for doing systematics. Is learning 
the intricacies of cladistic methodologies more important than learning the 
details of character state determination needed for completing a comprehensive 
morphologic description of a taxon? Both require considerable skill in 
application to obtain useful results. In most cases, the teaching of skills in 
character state determination is the secondary step, especially since 
relationships are evaluated on the basis of a selected set of characters, not a 
comprehensive set.

For most people, including paleontologists, systematics is dull. If we do not 
have to learn about tintinnids, scolecodonts, stenolaemates, hemichordates, or 
psilophytes, we are relieved. The result appears to be a dichotomy among 
paleontologists, with a majority of people having limited systematic knowledge 
and using numerical or instrumental techniques to work on paleontologic problems
and a minority of people (especially among the retired or near-retired) with 
great systematic knowledge who enjoy doing traditional descriptive systematics 
and who continue to generate much systematic literature. It is also noticeable 
that some who first worked in more topical paleontology have drifted into doing 
systematic work and that some excellent work is being done by self-trained 
paleontologists, done as an avocation. This contributes to the perception that 
systematics is no longer central to paleontology. The de facto result is that 
systematics has an important but reduced role in paleontology, being merely one 
of several skills. A skill that tends to be shunned by most.

_________________________________________________________________________
Thomas E. Yancey                                            _______       
Department of Geology and Geophysics                       |   |   |
Texas A&M University                                        _  |  _ 
College Station, TX 77843-3115                             |-| | |||
Voice: 409 845 0643    Fax: 409 845 6162
email: tyancey@tamu.edu
                     ---------------------                      (misquoted from)
Complex problems have simple, straightforward, wrong solutions.  (H.L. Mencken)