Re: bats & battalions (was Benton and Kinman)

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

Sorry for my expressions, I should go to bed.

> 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,

Neither does Mammalia.

> or in geological range,

Chondrichthyes surpasses Aves by far.

> 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).

Exactly how much morphological diversity is required? And _how_ do you
measure it? Or do you just _feel_ (aka _know_) what a class is -- while we
want to do science?

> Bats have been assigned their own Order, but not a separate Class.

So be it, to eternity, amen? While Catenulida has been raised from order to
class status (not accepted by those who want to retain Turbellaria at any
price)?

> And this was certainly
> NOT my arbitrary idea----

It was certainly not YOUR arbitrary idea. It certainly was an ARBITRARY
idea.

> it is part of a long tradition which continues to
> this day because it works well

...some would invoke laziness of thinking for a reason, maybe. Tradition. It
certainly works, but does it really work well? It is simply taught as a
truth that need not be questioned.

> Furthermore, it goes with the grain
> (not against the grain) of how the human brain organizes and classifies
> information.

This is true. _But_ we can use this way for stamps, or for finding out what
a worm is, or for organizing an army. This method regards every species (or
individual or whatever) as totally isolated and floating around in the air.
This is not the case for organisms (even though Linné thought that).
Organisms sit on lines of descent that connect them. You sometimes chop
these lines up -- somewhere, somehow. Phylogenetic taxonomists put labels on
some points (or, in the case of apomorphy-based definitions, internodes)
that are defined by topology and can therefore be found again -- it's
reproducible, it's science.

>       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.

Bad metaphor. There is absolutely no reason _or possibility_ to organize an
army cladistically -- the soldier profession isn't inherited. :-P

> [...] ad nauseum.

While I am at it -- ad nauseam. Nausea, female. Nausea, nauseae, nauseae,
nauseam, nausea, nausea... OK, the plural is useless :-)

>      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.

Which is why the military is not organized in any way that resembles
cladistics. I need not repeat that there is no chain of command among
species :-)

>       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.

Despite of "they've conquered the air" talk, Aves is not an air force and
Dinosauria no army.

> What if [...] [a]
> government was organized in cladistically nested sets with chains of
> command that just got longer and longer. Think about it.

Hmmm... I know lots of governments (of countries that termed bureaucratures)
that wouldn't show any results from such a change of organization. But I
don't want to start a thread on politics.