Who was the Willi Hennig Society?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Continuing the discussion from Does Science Work by Falsifiability?:

@Joe_Felsenstein

@John_Harshman

To be more precise, it’s members of the Hennig Society.

They do, but there are many other biologists who do too. What is odd is that those other biologists are often happy to do statistical tests on their observations. If Popper were correct, they wouldn’t need to.

Even the members of the Hennig Society, at the peak of their fervor for hypothetico-deductive reasoning, didn’t take a single refutation as decisive – they counted refutations of different possible phylogenies and chose the “least-refuted” one. Which isn’t Popper’s approach to refutation.

What is the Willi Hennig Society?

The Willi Hennig Society was founded in 1980 with the expressed purpose of promoting the field of Phylogenetic Systematics. Hennig’s idea that groups of organisms, or taxa, should be recognized and formally named only in cases where they are evolutionarily real entities, that is monophyletic, at first was controversial. It is now the prevailing approach to modern systematics.

The Hennig Society has a strong international character. It meets annually and the meetings usually alternate between North America and the rest of the world.

The journal Cladistics is the official publication of the Willi Hennig Society. It comprises a rich mixture of theoretical and empirical peer-reviewed contributions to phylogenetic systematics.

https://cladistics.org/