Re: hidden "cladistic" ranks

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 4:04 AM


>       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.

When the content is wrong, why stability of content?

> 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.

This might even depend on how much those specialists know about "strictly
cladistic classifications" -- or even cladistic analysis. I keep hearing
horror stories about some people at the paleontological institute here.
        Which is no surprise. Ernst Mayr has a good writing style, so people
read him. Hennig is said to have had a terrible style according to those who
have tried to read his works. I've heard from a native speaker of German and
apparently rather mediocre speaker of English that the English translation
of Hennig's book is easier to read than the German original. Indeed the book
was _retranslated_ into German (and is, as I hear, still bad reading). One
of the few German-language cladists, Peter Ax, has written similar books
with, as is said, even more new technical terms. (I don't intend to
disregard his probably important works on metazoan phylogeny.)
        Don't you think Hennig invented the term "sister group". This is
_Adelphotaxon_ in his writings and apparently most German works.

> I would like to see us avoid such a
> reactionary pendulum swing (which will hurt cladistic analysis as well),
but
> humans seem to have this tendency to blissfully ignore warning signs until
> it is too late and then an equally harmful reactionary backlash goes too
far
> in the other direction.  So many lessons we could learn from history if we

> would only pay more attention.

When I read this, I think of certain revolutions, wars and religious
schismata. I refuse to believe that taxonomy can cause any problems of that
order of magnitude.

>       Anyway, I don't think many papers are often turned down due to a
lack
> of cladograms.  That's the good news.

I hear about places where people are disregarded when they include
cladograms...

> I sometimes refer to it as [...] (the origin of
> monstrosities like "parvorders", "mirorders", "grandorders", ad nauseum).

Ad nauseam, I agree.

> They stretch the poor Linnean Hierarchy until it starts to break down, and
> then throw it away like a cheap broken toy.

But could it be fixed instead at all? And could we avoid to stretch the
Linnean hierarchy?
        After all, Linné himself only had kingdoms, classes, orders, genera
and species, as evident in the full title of _Systema Naturae [...]_. This
was simply not enough. Families, tribes and phyla are later additions, then
came super- and sub-, and later the not-so-mainstream infra-, not to mention
divisions, series, legions, cohorts and whatnot. BTW, there are a few
superspecies among the beetles.