Re: hidden "cladistic" ranks

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 12:59 AM
Subject: hidden "cladistic" ranks


>      Unfortunately, cladistic (phylogenetic) taxonomy has so many ranks
(now
> undesignated, but still there) that they finally had to give up trying to
> name them all.   I think it is just semantic "smoke and mirrors" (or more
> likely, not really examining what they have been taught) to claim they
have
> abandoned ranks.

OK, true. Phylogenetic taxonomy doesn't give up ranks, it justs bloats their
number to infinity and conciously ignores them then. Which is even better
:-)

Wait a minute. Actually ranks _are_ totally abandoned for clade names that
don't have qualifying clauses that state they must belong into another taxon
in order to be valid. When Carnosauria is {*Allosaurus* > *Passer*} and
Tyrannosauroidea is, for instance, {*Tyrannosaurus* > *Passer*}, then when
we don't have a phylogeny at hand, both names hang totally in the air. All
we know is that *Passer* can't belong into either. We can't know a priori
how big these groups might be.

>      In essence, cladistic taxonomy has one large taxon (Biota, or as I
call
> it "Geobiota"), plus many millions of species----and **everything** in
> between is an intermediate taxon.

Not everything is named.

> Instead of eliminating formal
> intermediate taxa (as I have done), they are encouraging huge increases in
> the number of such formal taxa.

_And glad to finally be able to do that._
As I've posted in May, Gnathostomata, Tetrapoda, Amniota and Sauropsida were
all proposed long before 1950, and are supposed to lie between Vertebrata
(generally accepted to be a subphylum) and various classes. Only one of them
can be a superclass; the Kinman System would even force us to forget them
all and Vertebrata too! Why do you give up good useful names?

> and at the same time eliminating the
> hierarchical signposts that have been long used in written and verbal
> communication between biologists.

You mean standardized endings? You have done most of that alone in 1994...
~:-|

> It's a darn good way to get lost,

when one tries to learn the phylogeny of all life to detailed levels. But
then, there are people who know the entire bible by heart... :-> [don't know
if any is alive today, but at least there were several in the 19th century]