Re: reason for dropping Owen

[christian farrell kammerer <cfkammer@midway.uchicago.edu>]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, David Elliott wrote:  
> I know distaste over the definition has been brought up and discussed
> in-depth before, but what i don't understand is something that those
> discussions seem to have taken as given: why the newer definition is
> accepted in the first place, how come "most recent common ancestor of
> _Triceratops_ and birds" has priority? Do the ICZN rules only apply after
> a certain date, or something similar? (serious question, it sounds like
> im being rhetorical here but really im not) Did Owen not publish in the
> right place? Or was there something in his wording... like an explicit
> definition based on characters and not relationships?

The ICZN has nothing to do with it. Such a matter of priority would be
handled by the (extremely controversial) provisions of PhyloCode, and
seeing as Owen died over a century before such a thing as PhyloCode was
ever imagined, his "definition" (warning: decidedly not a phylogenetic
definition as we know it) doesn't apply. Since the ICZN doesn't
deal with suprafamilial taxa, any researcher can play pretty fast and
loose with the definition of an "order" or such (not that that's always a
bad thing, mind you). And as for priority in a suprafamilial taxon, that
can get pretty nightmarish for the taxonomist. For example, try to look up
all the groups named "Apoda" or "Apodes"...there are probably hundreds of
them, all for different taxa.

-Christian Kammerer