Phylogenetic Systematics

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. First English translation.

SCARCE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION OF SEMINAL MONOGRAPH THAT TRANSFORMED EVOLUTIONARY THEORY.

26 x 18 cm hardcover, bookplate of Robert L Chevalier MD to front paste-down, institutional library card pocket to front free endpaper, tan cloth binding, [i-vii], 263 pp, 68 figures. Tape residue to edges of covers and endpapers, library handstamps on title page and bottom edge have been covered with black mark. Despite superficial library marks, the book appears unread. Very good minus in very good+ dust jacket in archival mylar sleeve. The scarce first edition of the English translation of the foundational text in evolutionary cladistic systematics.

WILLI HENNIG (1913 – 1976) was a German biologist who first became interested in insect phylogenies. "Phylogenetic Systematics," first published in German in 1950 was not published in English until 1966. It marks a turning point in the history of systematic biology. This highly influential work, in which Hennig argues for the primacy of the phylogenetic system as the general reference system in biology and establishes what we now call evolutionary trees, was very controversial at the time of its appearance and it opened up possibilities for evolutionary biology that have still not been fully explored. The work was published in a very limited number of copies in the German Democratic Republic and the real impact of it only really came with the first English edition offered here. From the time of Hennig's original formulation (in the present work) and up until the 1980s, cladistics constituted a minority approach to classification, but in the 1990s it quickly became the dominant method of classification in evolutionary biology. Contrary to the position generally held during his time, Hennig viewed historical inference as a strictly logical and scientific endeavor.