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Re: Hanson 2006, Mortimer, Baeker response

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <andreasj@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 11:35 AM

Maybe we should be over on the PhyloCode list by this stage, but if
the new version of the Code really does mean to say things like "you
should have EuWHATEVER if there's no WHATEVER", then it has
introduced all that is worst about rank-based nomenclature and needs
to be put out of its misery.  When changes in one taxon cause changes
in another, something is badly wrong.

No, no! Nothing must change!!! We are talking about a _Recommendation_ that names with such pre- or suffixes should be defined in such ways that their contents are not out of line with what the affix lets expect. If it turns out that a definition fails to do that, it stays. Definitions are forever, unless you appeal to the Committee.

As far as I understand, Euarchonta was named precisely *because*
Archonta was found to be polyphyletic. It was conceived as the
monophyletic core of what we used to think of as Archonta.


Yes.

It would be utterly perverse if PhyloCode forbade use such
nomenclatural rescue operations.


To the contrary.

The existence of Euarchonta after the damnatio memoriae of Archonta makes plenty of sense if you are a mammalologist who has followed the whole development. But for the next generations, and for today's outsiders, this situation is nothing but confusing and appears entirely useless. You see, the very idea that a name must be destroyed if the clade it describes changes its contents by whatever small amount is entirely limited to mammalology. In other fields Artiodactyla would stay Artiodactyla when the whales come in.