bats & battalions (was Benton and Kinman)

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

     Tim doesn't seem to get my military analogy, so I'll try to explain it 
a little more vividly.  But first, we again see the old argument that if 
birds get their own Class, then bats should as well.  For one thing, bats do 
not match birds in species diversity, or in geological range, and certainly 
not in morphological diversity (bats cannot match bird diversity exemplied 
by forms as diverse as hummingbirds, penguins, cranes, kiwis, and owls---not 
to mention all those extinct toothed forms in the Mesozoic).  Bats have been 
assigned their own Order, but not a separate Class.  And this was certainly 
NOT my arbitrary idea---- it is part of a long tradition which continues to 
this day because it works well (except for those of you who automatically 
reject all formal paraphyletic groups).  Furthermore, it goes with the grain 
(not against the grain) of how the human brain organizes and classifies 
information.
     Which brings me back to the military analogy.  If our government was 
organized strictly cladistically, the Air Force would still be one gigantic 
company (or platoon?) that was never allowed to separate from the Army.  So 
the cladists would have had to invent new intermediate ranks to divide the 
Air Force hierarchy:  gigaCorporal, magnaCorporal, superCorporal, Corporal, 
subCorporal, infraCorporal, subinfraCorporal, ad nauseum.
    Then when the hierarchy is a confusing mess, the cladists will declare: 
 No More Ranks.  If you want to know the organization and chain of command, 
you will just have to memorize it all or check one of the many different 
command charts ("cladograms") to see how it all fits together.  And 
splintered chains of command would become very very long, and the whole 
military would be in chaos.
     And all of this mess simply because strict cladists can't abide the 
thought of a paraphyletic Army, from which the Air Force should have been 
removed due to its expansion in size and diversity.   What if our whole 
federal government was organized in cladistically nested sets with chains of 
command that just got longer and longer. Think about it.
              --------Ken Kinman

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp