Why not be a cladist

Title is the title of a (1978) paper by Leigh van Valen one of the late great maverick evolutionary theorists of the late 20thC. I am happy to bring this back into discourse and Hats Off to University of Oslo Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) for archiving the journal Evolutionary Theory. It was agreeably clattered out on a manual fixed-width-font typewriter with blank spaces left to paste in pictures and diagrams and presumably, like our own contemporaneous Carnivore Genetics Newsletter, taken to a print shop as camera-ready copy. You can still see the staple holes from when one copy was disassembled and scanned to PDF. Fig 1b [R] from Why Not Be a Cladist.Q. So wtf is a cladist? A. One who trudges in the footsteps of Willi Hennig to accept Cladistics aka phylogenetic systematics as a useful [true?] explanation of biological diversity which so intrigues those who pay attention to the natural world. In the 1980s, cladistics was really annoying to traditional…