On November 5, 1981, Patterson gave a now infamous talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to the Systematics Discussion Group which met monthly at the museum. An unknown creationist in the audience secretly taped the talk, and a transcript was soon circulating as samizdat among creationists, and shortly thereafter among the scientific community at large.
The uncorrected transcript was plainly flawed--giving "Conbear" for "von Baer," for instance, and omitting the names of well-known biologists--but enough of Patterson's provocative points came through to ignite the firestorm which followed. Patterson soon came in for heavy criticism from the evolutionary community. The talk was much debated: what had he meant; was he simply tweaking noses in New York; what did he really think about evolution?
As creationist writers trumpeted the speech, Patterson retreated, understandably annoyed by the episode and the voluminous correspondence he received in its wake.
In August 1993, at a Systematics Association meeting in London, Patterson revisited his 1981 talk; specifically, the bearing of evolution on the practice and philosophy of systematics: ordering the relationships of organisms. In his recollections (published last year; see the notes on p.7), Patterson describes the background to the talk:
In November 1981, after an invitation from Donn Rosen [a fish systematist at the American Museum, now deceased], I gave a talk to the Systematics Discussion Group in the American Museum of Natural History. Donn asked me to talk on 'Evolutionism and Creationism', and it happened that just one week before my talk Ernst Mayr published a paper on systematics in Science (Mayr 1981). Mayr pointed out the deficiencies (in his view) of cladistics and phenetics, and noted that the 'connection with evolutionary principles is exceedingly tenuous in many recent cladistic writings.' For Mayr, classifications should incorporate such things as 'inferences on selection pressures, shifts of adaptive zones, evolutionary rates, and rates of evolutionary divergence.' Fired up by Mayr's paper, I gave a fairly radical talk in New York, comparing the effect of evolutionary theory on systematics with Gillespie's (1979, p. 8) characterization of pre-Darwinian creationism: 'not a research govering theory (since its power to explain was only verbal) but an antitheory, a void that had the function of knowledge but, as naturalists increasingly came to feel, conveyed none.' Unfortunately, and unknown to me, there was a creationist in my audience with a hidden tape recorder. A transcript of my talk was produced and circulated among creationists, and the talk has since been widely, and often inaccurately, quoted in creationist literature. 2 |
