© 2008 Society of Systematic Biologists
Phylogeny and Evolution of the Mollusca.—Edited by Winston F. Ponder and David R. Lindberg. 2008. University of California Press, Berkeley. xi + 469 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-25092-5. $49.95 £29.95 (hardcover)
Natal Museum Private Bag 9070, Pietermaritzburg, 3200, South Africa; E-mail: dherbert@nmsa.org.za
Phylogeny and Evolution of the Mollusca.—Edited by Winston F. Ponder and David R. Lindberg. 2008. University of California Press, Berkeley. xi + 469 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-25092-5. $49.95 £29.95 (hardcover).
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
For many malacologists, the last 20 to 30 years might have seemed a bewildering time. A cadre amongst us has been busy applying its collective minds to the subject of molluscan evolutionary relationships, and the boat has been seriously rocked. The reasons for this are essentially twofold. First, of course, much more data and evidence are now available and so decisions are more informed. Second, and just as significant, the methods of interpretation have become more robust and scientifically defensible, employing the now widely accepted phylogenetic (clade-based) method of inference.
One only has to look at the Gastropoda to see how things have changed. The Thiele system, which prevailed largely unmodified from the early 1930s, began to be dismantled and reconstructed in the 1980s—a process subsequently accelerated with the advent of molecular techniques. Today, the Thiele system is scarcely recognizable in current gastropod phylogenies and classifications.
A malacologist, not so