Is the ancestor of primates a primate or not?
Cladistics is a plain classification (ie, typological approach) and is as such ultimately paradoxically contradictory, as Bertrand Russell demonstrated with Russell’s paradox about a century ago.
This paradox is, however, difficult to explain in the context of biological systematics, since biological systematics ONLY discusses types (ie, classes, or kinds) and thus rotates within this paradox per definition. A paradox of types can’t be understood in terms of types.
The paradox can, however, be demonstrated by the fact that types of types (classes of classes, or kinds of kinds) are practical impossibilities. One such example is “primates”. Now, cladistics only recognizes “groups” consisting of “an ancestor and all its descendants”, but the problem with this recognition is whether the ancestor of primates is a primate or not? If it is a primate, then the “group” is a member of itself and thus infinitely recursive (ie, an infinite loop), whereas if it is not a primate, then the “group is indistinguishable per definition. This “group” is thus either an infinite loop or indistinguishable, that is, a practical impossibility.
This is what Russell’s paradox demonstrated before cladistics originated. “The father of cladistics”, Willi Hennig, must thus have been totally ignorant of this important finding.
Another contribution to understanding of conceptualization http://menvall.wordpress.com/
2013-03-20 16:52:00
Source: http://menvall.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/is-the-ancestor-of-primates-a-primate-or-not/
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