Popperian Corroboration and Phylogenetics

Popperian Corroboration and Phylogenetics

Starting with articles by Bock (1973) and Wiley (1975) in this journal, the field of systematic biology has a history, reviewed by Helfenbein and DeSalle (2005), of examining its methods in the context of the philosophy of science articulated by Karl R. Popper (e.g., 1959, 1962, 1983). Two main categories of debates have emerged in this literature. In one, Popper’s philosophy is assumed to be r...

From baconian to popperian neuroscience

The development of neuroscience over the past 50 years has some similarities with the development of physics in the 17th century. Towards the beginning of that century, Bacon promoted the systematic gathering of experimental data and the induction of scientific truth; towards the end, Newton expressed his principles of gravitation and motion in a concise set of mathematical equations that made ...

The poverty of Popperian epidemiology.

Karl Popper is one of the leading scientific philosophers of this century and his death marks the end of an era in philosophy which started with the publication of the Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1934 and went on until 1992 when he published a last collection of essays. He created an intellectual tidal wave in the philosophy of science by his bold claim that falsifiable hypotheses were the...

The corroboration paradox

Support versus corroboration

Numerous metrics have been developed that attempt to assess the reliability of phylogenetic trees. Several of these commonly used measures of tree and tree branch support are described and discussed in the context of their relationship to Popperian corroboration. Claims that measures of support indicate the accuracy of phylogenetic trees or provide information for tree choice are rebutted. Meas...