traditional eclecticism wasn't explicit (too murky)

["Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>]

Nick wrote:
>   I believe putting birds in a category with the same rank as all of the 
> rest of Dinosauria implies that all members of the bird category are 
> related equally to all members of the dinosaur category, and that we know 
> not to be true.
  Nick:
     That is why in the Kinman System, if one creates a paraphyletic group 
like Dinosauria, one must place an {{Aves}} marker within dinosaurian 
classifications, placed beside the dinosaur group you believe to be their 
closest relatives.  Michael J. Benton did something similar in his recent 
1997 book, which I was very happy to see (although he didn't use anything 
like explicit double brackets).
     Furthermore, the paraphyleticism is also reflected in paraphyletic 
coding (which I haven't brought up in this list yet):
    3  Ornithischiformes
    4  Saurischiformes
   _a_ {{Aves}}
The underlined "a" code shows that birds have been paraphyletically remove 
from Saurischiformes (sorry, I only know how to actually underline the "a" 
on Apple computers).
    Therefore, although traditional eclectic classifications can be 
criticized as implying that birds are equally related to all dinosaurs, the 
required markers in the Kinman System explicitly show a relationship to a 
particular subset of saurischians.  If I actually believed birds were 
equally related to all saurischians, I would have coded the {{Aves}} marker 
with number 5 (rather than _a_), showing a sister group relationship between 
Saurischiformes and Aves.
     Within Saurischiformes, different workers might have different ideas 
where to place the {{Aves}} marker: as sister group to Dromaeosauridae, or 
sister group to Troodontidae, or sister group of a Dromaeosaur-Troodont 
clade (Sereno, 1999).
     The IMPORTANT point is that the Kinman System only formally recognizes 
those clades which almost everyone agrees upon (Aves, Dromaeosauridae, 
Troodontidae).  But different workers can arrange and code them slightly 
differently to reflect different viewpoints.  Therefore the formal 
classification (clades that most agree upon) is stabilized, and the 
quibbling among the experts (about exactly how they are related) is 
reflected in an easily modified code.
                       ------Ken Kinman

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