Teacher: Dr. Kirk Fitzhugh, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, USA.
Approaching the subject from the perspective of the philosophical foundations of scientific inquiry, this course offers critical examinations of the principles required to judge the scientific merits of systematic/taxonomic procedures by way of the following topics:
1. Introduction
2. The goal of science. The goal of biological systematics
a. The nature of understanding
b. Basic foundations of scientific inquiry
c. Systematics versus taxonomy
3. Causal relationships in systematics
a. Taxa and causal understanding
4. The nature of why-questions
5. The three forms of reasoning: deduction, induction, abduction
6. The uses of deduction, induction, and abduction in science
a. Defining fact, hypothesis, and theory
b. Background knowledge
c. Theory and hypothesis testing
d. The meanings of evidence and support
7. Systematics involves abductive reasoning
8. Inferences of systematics hypotheses, i.e. taxa
a. The ‘species problem’ and its solution
b. Implications for bar coding
c. Specific and phylogenetic hypotheses/taxa
9. Some implications for “phylogenetic” methods
a. The limits of phylogenetic hypotheses
b. Relations between types of evidence in systematics
c. Abductive reasoning and parsimony
d. Abductive reasoning and likelihood
e. Abductive reasoning and Bayesianism
10. The Requirement of total evidence (RTE)
a. Relation of RTE to inference
b. Relation of RTE to systematics
c. Implications for systematics
d. The errors of cladogram comparisons and character mapping
11. Homology & homogeny & homoplasy
a. Richard Owen’s use of homologue and homology
b. E.R. Lankester’s replacement terms, homogen, homogeny, and homoplasy
c. Implications of abductive reasoning for the utility of these concepts
12. Character coding
a. Why character coding is necessary for systematics
b. Accurately representing observation statements
c. Character coding, why-questions, and the data matrix
13. Sequence data and phylogenetic inference: implications of top-down causation
14. The mechanics of hypothesis testing in biological systematics
a. Traditional misconceptions about testing phylogenetic hypotheses
b. Basics of testing explanatory hypotheses
c. The uses of evidence, revisited
d. What is actually required to test phylogenetic hypotheses
e. The limits on acquiring causal understanding via phylogenetic hypotheses
f. The myths of support measures: bootstrap, jack-knife, Bremer, etc.
15. Implications for nomenclature
16. Defining biodiversity and conservation
Participants will be provided reprints covering the topics in the course, as well as a PDF file with all course slides (>800) and associated notes.
Course organisers: Distributed European School of Taxonomy (DEST) and Research School in Biosystematics (ForBio)
Course credits: 2 ECTS
Target Audience: MSc students, PhD students, early career researchers, professional systematists/taxonomists and anyone who is interested in the philosophy of Biological Systematics
Selection: Criteria for selection will be scientific merit, motivation and usefulness of the training course for your career.
Course fee: 350 EUR includes course and shared accommodation at Tollboden. ForBio will cover the course fee for all accepted ForBio members, and this includes accommodation. In addition, ForBio will cover travel for Norwegian ForBio members. Meals are not included in the registration fee but the station has cooking facilities and food can be bought and prepared together in shifts.
Minimum number of participants: Course will be cancelled if a minimum number of 15 participants is not reached.
Registration: Registration is through DEST. Click here for the registration form. Deadline 1 July 2016.