Judge Starling

In 1997, I was invited to give a talk at the Willi Hennig Society Annual Meeting in Washington DC. The invitation was a huge surprise, since I am a student of Masatoshi Nei, who coauthored the neighbor-joining method, and as such he and his students were forever branded “pheneticists.”

For the young readers, the difference between Cladistics and Phenetics was considered by the members of the Willi Hennig Society to be as unbridgeable as that between Capitalists and Communists or, worse, that between Coca Cola and Pepsi.

I have later found out that the Willi Hennig Society had a tradition of inviting a punch-bag every year for the sole purpose of uniting the ranks against a common enemy. In 1997, I was the punch bag. Unfortunately, for the faithful members of the Willi Hennig Church of Correct Cladistics they invited a wrong punch-bag, since their 1997 punch-bag punched back.

I don’t recall much from the meeting, but I do remember the personality cult, the vicious personal attacks, and the buttons that everyone was wearing.

I was born in Romania and have lived there for 11 years. I am, hence, quite familiar with some aspects of personality cults. At the 1997 meeting, I was struck by the adulation and adoration of James Farris, the self-anointed Son-and-Holy-Spirit-in-One and protector of Heavenly Father Willi Hennig’s Cult of Cladistics.

Young and old, male and female, almost all speakers used the phrase “as Doctor Farris so wisely stated.” When, it was my turn to give a talk, I was tempted to replace “Doctor Farris” by “Comrade Stalin” or “Comrade Ceaușescu,” but then I remembered that the high priests (the organizers) still have the power not to reimburse my travel expenses and decided not to push my luck.

The second thing that I observed was the hatred and contempt towards one person, Joe Felsenstein. To this day, I have no idea what Dr. Felsenstein did or didn’t do to cause such ruckus at the meeting, but everyone was up at arms against the man. One possibility may be that in 1996-1997 several papers were published in which the phenomenon of long-branch attraction (which was first suggested in 1970s by Felsenstein) became a fashionable subject of study, and more and more people exposed the weaknesses of the maximum parsimony method, especailly are as far as molecular data are concerned. I was quite happy Joe Felsenstein was not in attendance, for he might have been excommunicated, as William of Occam, on whose principles Cladistics is purportedly based, was in 1328 by Pope John XXII.

The third thing that I noticed at this meeting was a small machine for stamping buttons like those worn at election time at GOP meetings. For a few dollars, one could buy a button out of a selection of about four, all carrying the prohibition circle-slash symbol. I bought two. One with Joe Felsenstein’s picture, which I send to Joe and most probably caused him to chuckle a bit; the other with a slashed letter L. 

It took me a few minutes to understand that the letter L stood for “likelihood,” which in the cladistic thesaurus serves as curse word akin to cunt or nigger. (I recently noticed that the L-word has been coopted for nonphylogenetic purposes.)

As with measles and chickenpox, I decided once is enough and have never again attended a meeting of the Willi Hennig Society or read its journal. When I saw #ParsimonyGate trending on Twitter and deciphered its meaning, I felt a bit of nostalgia and decided to look at the great developments in the field of Cladistics.

The journal Cladistics hasn’t changed much except that the articles of faith of the correct religion have now been made blatantly public. Moreover, James Farris who describes himself as “an unrepentant Hennigian” continues to guard the purity of parsimony, lambast heretics, post-Hennigians, and other born-again rationalists, attack all other methods of phylogenetic reconstruction, and preach against probabilities, both frequentist and Bayesian.

With articles entitled “Pattern cladistics really means paraphyly,” “Taxic homology is neither,” “Popper with probability,” “Symplesiomorphies and explanation,” “Nelson’s arrested development,” and “Counterfeit cladistics,” Farris proves at least four times each year that splitting hairs and masturbation can be fun.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.