RE: hidden "cladistic" ranks

["T. Mike Keesey" <tmk@dinosauricon.com>]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Ken Kinman wrote:

> Mike and Tracy,
>       I must say that Mike's post surprised me a little when I saw
> Coelophysoidea now being excluded from Neotheropoda-----I guess more of that
> stability of content being sacrificed for stability of definition.

_Neotheropoda_ is anchored on _Ceratosaurus_, not _Coelophysis_. In fact,
unless I'm mistaken, the original usage did exclude _Coelophysis_ et al.

This is the price you pay for having a system wherein the researcher says
"A does not belong to B because the explicit definition of B defines a
clade which, as far as we can tell, excludes A (pending further data and
analysis)" as opposed to "A does not belong to B because I don't feel that
it should (pending further mood swings)."

You tout your classification system as more stable, and yet you allow such
wastebasket taxa as "Thecodontiformes", claiming that once the phylogeny
is better understood, they can be re-classified accordingly. I see
instability in both systems, but in one it's based on actual developments
in phylogenetic hypotheses, and in the other it's based on aesthetics. As
a Visual Arts major I appreciate the value of aesthetics, but ... this
here is science, not art.

> And I can understand that classifications can be collapsed for
> "non-specialists", but this really just boils down to a strawman
> argument, since there are also a large number of specialists who don't
> like strictly cladistic classifications either.

It still denies the idea that Linnaean ranks are necessary in order to
keep taxonomy accessible to the non-specialist. I really think they're
only useful to those who have lived so long with them they can't imagine a
viable system without them. Convince me that Struthioniformes is somehow
meaningfully equivalent to Ornithischia and I'll retract.

_____________________________________________________________________________
T. MICHAEL KEESEY
 The Dinosauricon        <http://dinosauricon.com>
  BloodySteak             <http://www.bloodysteak.com>
   personal                <keesey@bigfoot.com> --> <tmk@dinosauricon.com>
    Dinosauricon-related    <dinosaur@dinosauricon.com>
     AOL Instant Messenger   <Ric Blayze>
      ICQ                     <77314901>
       Yahoo! Messenger        <Mighty Odinn>