User:Jtwsaddress42/Quotes/Cavalier-Smith, Thomas 2010a(b)

Phylogenetic Fashions & Long Neglected Facts "'Great advances in knowledge and understanding of organismal history have been made, but some fashions, attitudes and dogmas have spread more widely and dominated other viewpoints more than their scientific merits justify. The significance of the stasis of ancestral body plans over billenia and the non-uniformity of evolutionary modes and rates is insufficiently appreciated. Much discussion has been among students of recently derived branches of the tree (Hennig insects; Mayr birds) or among those whose focus is biochemistry or computer algorithms, rather than organisms and the needs and principles of taxonomy. I offer the perspective of a biologist especially interested in unicellular organisms, ancestral groups and in explaining the major transitions of life, perhaps more conscious than most of flaws in some aspects of recent phylogenetic fashions.'

Thomas Cavalier-Smith (2010)"