Philosophy and Systematics

When we think the role of philosophy in systematics, we can talk about Popperian falsification and corroboration, frequentism and Bayesian philosophy different philosophical currents, bases for phylogenetic methods.  However, if we want to know the relations between groups of organism, which one is the better current to do phylogeny? 

Popperian falsification and corroboration never search the best classification hypothesis, it looks hypothesis with the highest degree of corroboration (Bock, 1973); in other way frequentism has a statistical approach, assess the expected frequencies of good and bad results of a repeated number of measures (Sober, 2008; VanderPlas, 2014). As frequestism, Bayesian philosophy based on statistics, but using a priori and a posteriori probabilities (degrees of knowledge) that let us include ranks of certainty about statements (Stevens, 2006).

Some authors highlight the influence of that Popperian falsification in systematics and others defend its use as the appropriate approach to the search of phylogeny (Farris, 2012), the same with frequentism (Sober, 2008). However, Bayesian is the most reliable way to do phylogeny, because estimate the best probability of classification hypothesis (posterior) and evaluating prior probabilities, giving a background knowledge to the topology (Ronquist, et al. 20014) and in my point of view allows a broader approach.

 

References

Bock, W. J. (1973). Philosophical foundations of classical evolutionary classification. Systematic Zoology. Vol. 22 (4), 375–392.

Farris, J. (2012). Popper: not Bayes or Rieppel. Cladistics. 

Ronquist, F. Huelsenbeck, J. P. Britton, T. (2004). Bayesian supertrees. In Bininda-Emonds, O. R. P. Phylogenetic Supertrees: Combining Information to Reveal the Tree of Life. Amsterdam, Netherlands. Kluwer.

Sober, E. (2008). Evidence and Evolution: The logic behind the science. New York, United States of America. Cambridge University Press.

Stevens, M. (2006). The Bayesian Approach to the Philosophy of Science. In Borchert, D. (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Michigan, United States of America. Thompson Gale.

VanderPlas, J. (2014). Frequentism and Bayesianism: A Practical Introduction, Part III. Pythonic Perambulations. Visible in: http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/06/12/frequentism-and-bayesianism-3-confidence-credibility/