The Willi Hennig Society "was founded in 1980 with the expressed purpose of promoting the field of

phylogenetic systematics Cladistics (; ) is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups ("clades") based on hypotheses of most recent common ancestry. The evidence for hypothesized relationships is typically shared derived chara ...

." The society is represented by phylogenetic systematists managing and publishing in the peer-reviewed journal titled ''

Cladistics Cladistics (; ) is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups (" clades") based on hypotheses of most recent common ancestry. The evidence for hypothesized relationships is typically shared derived cha ...

''. The society is named after

Willi Hennig Emil Hans Willi Hennig (20 April 1913 – 5 November 1976) was a German biologist and zoologist who is considered the founder of phylogenetic systematics, otherwise known as cladistics. In 1945 as a prisoner of war, Hennig began work on his the ...

, a German systematic entomologist who developed the modern methods and philosophical approach to systematics in the 1940s and 1950s. The society is also involved in reconstructing the

tree of life The tree of life is a fundamental archetype in many of the world's mythological, religious, and philosophical traditions. It is closely related to the concept of the sacred tree.Giovino, Mariana (2007). ''The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A Hist ...

. The current president, Ward Wheeler of the American Museum of Natural History, was elected in 2016, succeeding Dr. Jyrki Muona.

Founding

The Willi Hennig Society was founded on a philosophical division among systematic biologists in the late 1970s. A debate created the rift between pheneticists who advocated for statistical or numerical methods that grouped taxa by overall similarity in

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

and systematic biologists who adopted a strict cladistic approach to taxonomy, recognizing groups by shared, derived characters alone. The last public clash occurred at the 13th Annual Numerical Taxonomy Conference at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Harvard University in October 1979. Twelve months later, the Willi Hennig Society was founded through invitation by Professor Edward O. Wiley and founding president James S. Farris. Seventy eight systematists from Great Britain, Sweden, Canada, and the United States gathered at the University of Kansas, to inaugurate the Willi Hennig Society. Membership doubled to over 150 by the second meeting.

Background

The Willi Hennig Society is primarily involved in projects aimed at the study and classification of biodiversity using the original methods and philosophy outlined by Willi Hennig in his book "Phylogenetic Systematics". In 1994, the society teamed up with the

Society of Systematic Biologists The Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) started as the Society of Systematic Zoology in 1947. A temporary constitution was adopted at the first meeting on 28 December 1947. The updated "biologists" organization (from "zoology") become incorpora ...

and the

American Society of Plant Taxonomists The American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) is a botanical organization formed in 1935 to "foster, encourage, and promote education and research in the field of plant taxonomy, to include those areas and fields of study that contribute to and b ...

to organize the Systematics Agenda 2000. The Systematics Agenda 2000 is ongoing and has set out to deliver on the following mission statements: #Mission 1: To discover and document past and present life on earth #Mission 2: To analyze and synthesize the information derived from this global discovery effort into a history of life and predictive classification system #Mission 3: To understand the evolutionary mechanisms that explain the origin, maintenance, and

loss of biodiversity Biodiversity loss includes the worldwide extinction of different species, as well as the local reduction or loss of species in a certain habitat, resulting in a loss of biological diversity. The latter phenomenon can be temporary or permanent, de ...

#Mission 4: To communicate and apply this knowledge to science and society

Publishing

The Willi Hennig Society publishes the journal ''

''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Willi Hennig Society 1980 establishments in Kansas Scientific societies based in the United States Scientific organizations established in 1980 Phylogenetics