At least in the Unites States, most undergraduate biology majors are required to take an evolution course as part of their core curriculum, but I know of no undergraduate curriculum that requires a course in systematics. While evolution does indeed explain the “why” of homology, systematics tackles the more fundamental questions of “what is homology, how do we discover it, and use it to infer phylogenetic relationships?”
Dr. Moroz is right to decry a dearth of graduate-level evolution courses,1 but I would argue that the situation for systematics is even more dire than it is for evolution. This is due, in large part, to the usurpation of systematics as an independent field of inquiry by the “architects” of the modern synthesis in the 1940s, who conflated evidence with explanation and relegated the concept of homology and other principles of systematics to tautology, as “products of evolution.”
Andrew V. Z. Brower ...
