On painting reality – can it fuse with reality as cladistics claim?

About a century after Charles Darwin presented his theory “on the origin of species”, the German Nazi entomologist Willi Hennig (“the father of cladistics”) claimed that it was time to accept and believe in Darwin’s idea of a tree of life.

Some biological systematists agreed, most notably Gareth Nelson and Steve Farris, an approach that became known as “cladistics” (hence “the father of cladistics”) since it distinguished the totally new class called clade.

Other biological systematists protested, pointing at the fact that Darwin’s idea interpreted as a single true tree of life is self-contradictory. It simply does not break even, but is instead analogous to an idea that there is a single true map of reality, when fact is that the three properties angle, distance and area simply can’t be truthfully reproduced at the same time.

Confronted with this problem, cladists refrained to the claim that when reality and map can’t agree, then map has to rule (a statement that was originally a joke about military rigidity), as if the ruling itself would solve the problem of self-contradiction.  This is a misunderstanding. The problem with Hennig’s claim is not that reality and map can’t agree  (ie, that reality and a ”tree of life” can’t agree) in itself, but that the claim is self-contradictory. The problem is not the impossibility for reality and a tree of life to agree, but that Hennig’s claim (ie, belief) that they can is self-contradictory. The problem is that this self-contradiction means that there isn’t any non-contradictory solution to the claim (ie, belief).

The question why reality and a tree of life can’t agree is not something we can solve, but something we just can understand. Not all problems can be solved, because it requires a fusion of question with answer. One problem that will remain unsolved forever is that reality and our interpretation of it are spaced.  Never will we find the solution that fuses them (independently of what cladists claim).

Another contribution to understanding of conceptualization http://menvall.wordpress.com/