The centrality of phylogenetic thinking

My dissertation is on the centrality of phylogenetic thinking in biology, and how this is exemplified in three particular cases. I treat phylogenetic thinking as a perspective to which biologists are committed. This perspective can have different forms or instances, which may be distinguished by different commitments. Different commitments might include using one methodology to reconstruct phylogeny rather than another, or approaching (or even identifying) biological problems with a particular set of conceptual tools. I am most interested in perspectives of phylogenetic thinking that are fundamentally informed by Darwin, Hennig and the individuality theses of Ghiselin and Hull. Though there are other instances of the perspective of phylogenetic thinking, those informed by these three ingredients are historically significant and dominate modern approaches to biology.; The centrality of phylogenetic thinking is the theme that ties together the chapters that follow. What is it for biologists to take a phylogenetic perspective in systematics? On phylogeny reconstruction and inference? On evolutionary theory? On classification? Historically, philosophers have described the debates in systematics as a debate between theoretical perspectives, i.e., between pheneticism, cladism and evolutionary taxonomy. In contemporary systematics, these debates are largely resolved and relegated to history (though they still resonate). I don't intend to retell the story of this resolution, but instead look at debates that have persisted within phylogenetic systematics as a result of a commitment to phylogenetic thinking. What licenses inferring phylogeny? Which methods of phylogeny reconstruction are thus justifiable? What conceptual resources are available for theorizing about reproduction and selection of higher taxa in a phylogenetic framework? What is the extent that one might be committed to phylogenetic thinking? What consequences follow from extending this commitment to biological nomenclature? These are all topic questions currently being debated by systematists. My hope is that what follows lends clarity to those debates.