Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay

Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay is a short book about biological systematics and taxonomy. Some of the subjects considered in it are philosophical: taxonomic theory, species concepts, speciation models, and evolutionary theories. Yet the book also covers matters not philosophical, such as taxonomic operations, experimental taxonomy, and a new suggested taxonomic method with worked examples. The author finds relationships among these topics. The book is addressed to biosystematists, practicing biological taxonomists, and philosophers of biology. It will also interest others who draw on biological taxonomy and biosystematics in their work.

   The book goes into some old topics such as traditional biological identifying, classifying, and nomenclature; some recent, such as cladistic analysis, phylogenetics, and phylogenomics; and a few new, such as the logic of mutually exclusive taxon definitions, and techniques for using directly observed reproductive events and pedigree analysis to untangle certain taxonomic dilemmas. There is a chapter about minimizing ambiguities when defining biological taxa, a chapter on the relevance of human biology to biosystematics, chapters addressing some biosystematic problems associated with the phenomenon of hybridization, a chapter on the relationship of biological taxonomy to conservation biology, and a chapter about the scientificity of evolutionary theories. Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay is published with a glossary, twelve figures, a dynamic table of contents, linked cross references, and linked bibliographic citations. 

   Descent and Logic in Biosystematics: An Essay should be considered for academic libraries, research libraries, natural history museum libraries, the libraries of conservation organizations, and some private libraries. A print version is available from the publisher, Perseverant Publishing.