I'll read it, because I don't understand the few pages I've
already looked at.
Georg's mentor is the systematicist J.-W. Wa[e]gele, who in 1994,
presented a collaborative paper with Ronald Wetzel, in Jour. Natural
History 28(4), "Nucleic acid sequence data are not per se reliable for
inference of phylogenies".
Haven't read that -- may I offer a prejudice? They aren't
reliable because they practically always find Ecdysozoa and Lophotrochozoa, and
never his beloved Articulata. "Wägele et al. (1999)" is what I cut out of the
Zrzavý quote. OK, I'll stop here and look for the paper.
Coupled with several other papers, the reader (and List participant) will
have further tools for sorting out some of semantic tap-dancing encountered in
recent days in these postings re: Aves.
The Phylocode is evolving, and
phylogenetic systematics just might (at least, I would hope so) forever end
the nonsensical harping on every indeterminate scrap of dinosaur bone given a
new name.
No, why? The binomial will disappear some way or other, but
the current draft of the PhyloCode wouldn't stop anyone from naming a new clade
with a scrappy specimen as an anchor.
Stephan Jay Gould [...]
Stephen.
:-)