Re: bats & battalions (+ pentastomids & marsupials)

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

    Tim thinks I am using circular argumentation, maintaining tradition 
just because it's traditional.  Wrong!!  I obviously take tradition and 
utility into account, but they are hardly my only criteria.
    And pentastomid worms are a perfect example.  I didn't keep them as a 
separate phylum, or even as a separate class (I broke with tradition and 
reduced it to an Order of branchiuran crustaceans):

Class Branchiurea
    1  Argulida (fish lice)
    2  Pentastomida (tongue worms)
    ?  Facivermida (Cambrian forms)

Phylum Protarthropoda (which once included the pentastomid worms) still 
includes Class Tardigradea (waterbears) plus a couple of extinct classes.  
On the other hand, I transferred Class Onychophorea (walking worms) to the 
base of Phylum Arthropoda.
     I put vestimentiferans (afrenulate beardworms) in Phylum Pogonophora 
(along with the frenulate beardworms), but more recent evidence indicates 
that both classes of beardworms should actually be placed with the annelid 
classes (more phylum consolidation is obviously needed).  And my new Class 
Scorpionea (uniting Scorpionida and the eurypterid orders) was definitely 
not traditional---- and at the time, placing Order Opabiniida in Class 
Anomalocarea was still considered extremely speculative (it is now far more 
acceptable and mainstream).
    And the marsupials were brought up in another post, which do indeed 
display a diversity which should not be stuffed into a single Order 
Marsupialia (and I didn't!!!).
 In my 1994 classification, marsupials are divided into nine separate 
Orders---- kangaroos and allies in an Order separate from bandicoots, and 
numbats (and allies) in another, and so forth.  I like a balanced approach, 
even if some traditional taxa must be broken up.  But I still code those 
nine marsupial orders together as a single "marsupial" clade.
     I clearly break from tradition when new knowledge requires it, but 
only after careful deliberation and taking a lot of different factors into 
account.  However, I will not abandon the four traditional Classes of 
tetrapods just because strict cladists have been taught to believe that 
formal paraphyly is always a bad, unnatural way to classify.
    I am not an old-fashioned eclecticist stuck in an old rut.  But I will 
not swing the pendulum to the other extreme of strict cladism either.  And 
that is why I get "flack" from both sides, but I knew very well that would 
happen once I published my ideas and classifications.    So it goes.
            ---------Ken Kinman
P.S.  Being human constructs, all classifications are to some extent 
arbitrary and subjective (even strictly cladistic ones).  My goal is to 
minimize arbitrariness as much as I can, but at the same time avoid the 
pitfalls of both strict eclecticism and strict cladism.  In my opinion, 
strict cladism not only fails to minimize arbitrariness and subjectivity, 
but also exacts a heavy price that we have just begun to pay (and which will 
get worse).  A cladisto-eclectic middle ground is therefore inevitable, but 
how bad things have to get for this to be widely recognized is hard to 
predict.

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