Göpel Torben, Richter Stefan
Allgemeine & Spezielle Zoologie, Institut für Biowissenschaften, Universität Rostock, Universitätsplatz 2, Rostock, 18055, Germany.
Cladistics. 2016 Dec;32(6):682-690. doi: 10.1111/cla.12145. Epub 2016 Jan 7.
The field of morphology has recently seen the arrival of computer-aided ontologies, tools which permit the semantic organization of defined concepts and which therefore promise to be extremely useful in computer-mediated approaches involving morphological data, for example in cladistics. The theoretical relationship between ontologies and cladistics, however, has hardly been explored. Here we examine the ontological status of the main terms in morphological cladistics, i.e. morpheme, character, character state and ontological concept. Morphemes are units of the descriptional perspective, whereas character states are units of the evolutionary perspective and refer to identical stages of transformation. Both morphemes and character states represent things, i.e. real entities. However, character state and morpheme denote different perspectives on these entities (description vs. evolution). Characters (transformation series; Hennig's ideographic character concept) and ontological concepts are both classes, but not of the same nature. Ontological concepts which are used to classify morphemes are constructs, i.e. totally man-made classes that serve only as a way of classifying real entities for human recognition. Characters, however, are classes that encompass all character states of common descent and which therefore have objective, human-independent properties. Characters, then, are natural kinds, classes which exhibit a natural identity in the same way as monophyla do, for example, which also have common descent as an objective property. Against this background, ontology-based morphology can be a valuable addition to phylogenetic systematics. Formalized, machine-parsable descriptions permit the generalization of morphemes in large datasets and can facilitate the recognition of identical character states. However, the expertise of the researcher is indispensable, and full automation of the transfer from the descriptive level to the evolutionary level thus appears impossible.
形态学领域最近出现了计算机辅助本体论，这种工具允许对定义的概念进行语义组织，因此有望在涉及形态学数据的计算机介导方法中非常有用，例如在分支系统学中。然而，本体论与分支系统学之间的理论关系几乎尚未得到探讨。在这里，我们研究形态学分支系统学中主要术语的本体论地位，即语素、性状、性状状态和本体论概念。语素是描述视角的单位，而性状状态是进化视角的单位，指的是相同的转变阶段。语素和性状状态都代表事物，即真实的实体。然而，性状状态和语素表示对这些实体的不同视角（描述与进化）。性状（转变系列；亨尼希的表意性状概念）和本体论概念都是类，但性质不同。用于对语素进行分类的本体论概念是构建物，即完全人为的类，仅作为对真实实体进行分类以供人类识别的一种方式。然而，性状是包含共同祖先的所有性状状态的类，因此具有客观的、不依赖于人类的属性。那么，性状是自然类，这类与单系类一样以相同方式呈现自然同一性，例如单系类也具有共同祖先这一客观属性。在此背景下，基于本体论的形态学可以成为系统发育系统学的一个有价值的补充。形式化的、机器可解析的描述允许在大型数据集中对语素进行概括，并有助于识别相同的性状状态。然而，研究人员的专业知识是不可或缺的，因此从描述层面到进化层面的完全自动化转换似乎是不可能的。
