Re: Species [ was: Re: Hadrosaur nomenclature]

[AM Yates <Adam.Yates@bristol.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jonathan R. Wagner wrote:

>     As for the "genus becoming the smallest recognizable unit of
> biodiversity," I must say I run in *much* different circles than HP Yates.
> Nearly every biologist I have ever heard/read/seen sees the species as this
> unit. Indeed, given that many extant genera contain large numbers of species
> (up to the thousands in beetles, I'm told), there does not seem to be a way
> that this could be true. As a matter of fact, beyond association of a genus
> with a particular clade, I have never heard, or heard of, *anyone* claiming
> that genera in general are in any way "real." This is good, because they are
> no more real than any other categorical rank of the Linnaean hierarchy.
> 

Actually, I suspect our circles aren't that different and I agree with a
lot (but not all) of what HP Wagner says. I think this is a case of
missunderstanding what I wrote. I would NEVER advocate abandoning
recognised species and using the genus as the smallest unit. For
instance I do not advocate simply calling all dogs wolfs and coyotes
"Canis" without recognising lupus, latrans and familiaris. That would be
extremely stupid. The point I was trying to make was that if we are
going to abandon the binomial, I would rather use the well known
Protohadros, Eolambia, and Hadrosaurus rather than byrdi, carolejonesa
and foulki as the standard uninomial. I'm well aware that this will not
work in a lot of other cases. There is a whole paper (or even series of
papers?) by Cantino et al.  on possible ways existing binomials could be
converted to uninomials. I guess what I would like is a pluralistic
approach to the whole affair, let us keep our cherished genus names for
dinosaurs even if other methods of conversion will be needed elsewhere.
This is of course all off in the future, in the meantime these issues
need to be discussed thoroughly on fora like this one, which is why I'm
enjoying this thread immensely. 

cheers

Adam Yates