Emphasizing the importance of understanding the past to make sense of the future, this book presents a historical analysis of the evolution of systematics during the last one hundred years. The authors examine the major issues that have driven the field and illuminate those that will be of importance in the immediate future. They present a general assessment of comparative biology's recent past, exploring the full impact of the cladistics revolution, a phenomenon that has yet to be fully appreciated, and provide a platform for further debate and discussion.

David M. Williams, Peter L. Forey

Introduction. Setting Up Milestones: Sneath on Adanson and Mayr on Darwin. Launching the Society of Systematic Zoology in 1947. Explanations in Systematics. What Happens if the Language of Science Happens to Break Down in Systematics? - A Popperian Perspective. Hennig's Phylogenetic Systematics Bought Up-to-date. The Arrested Development of Cladistics. Systematics and Paleontology. Parsimony and Computers. Homology and Homologues, Cladistics and Phenetics: 100 Years of Progress. From Dispersal to Geographic Congruence: Comments on Cladistic Biogeography in the 20th Century. The Fall and Rise of Evolutionary Developmental Biology.