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Punctuationism, cladistics and the legacy of medieval neoplatonism

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Human Evolution

Abstract

The current dominant orthoxy in paleoanthropology has adopted the stance of cladistics and/or punctuationism and abandonned any concern for the mechanics by which selection has operated to control the course of human evolution. Rather than being a «new» intellectual development, this is simply the most recent manifestation of a tradition of thinking that goes back via Linnaeus to medieval scholasticism where reality was assumed to consist of discrete entities that can be dealt with solely by the exercis of deductive logic. While the construction of cladograms serves the useful function of proposing testable hypotheses, the promotion of cladistic logic as the only valid approach represents a great leap backwards into medieval intellectual stagnation. If an inductive component is not restored to paleoanthropology, it will cease to maintain its credibility as a productive science.

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Brace, C.L. Punctuationism, cladistics and the legacy of medieval neoplatonism. Hum. Evol. 3, 121–139 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02437437

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