ABSTRACT
When Julian Huxley edited The New Systematics in 1940, he may not have appreciated fully the extent to which it would provide the battle cry for those who would dilute, detract from and eventually decimate taxonomy. To the contrary, he began his introduction by stating that, in advocating the ‘New Systematics’, he nonetheless acknowledged value in the old:
Unfortunately, Huxley and his contemporaries conflated pattern with process and supposed, as was the prevailing view of the emerging ‘New Synthesis’, that the former (e.g. species or clades) could be understood merely as the latter (i.e. evolutionary processes) progressed over sufficient periods of time. He was confusing the methods and goals of the emerging science of population genetics with those of the established science of taxonomy; this is understandable to the extent that questions of species and speciation do intersect and necessarily overlap to some degree along that line between micro-and macro-evolution (Nixon and Wheeler, 1992). The epistemological bases of population genetics-an experimental biology-and of taxonomy-a historical and comparative but non-experimental biology-are simply incompatible. To do either well, one simply cannot use a single approach to both.
