Re: The Papers That Ate Cincinnati

[Anthony Docimo <keenir@hotmail.com>]

> > > "I've often thought that implementing the PhyloCode would be a lot
> > > easier if it simply used new names and didn't convert any traditional
> > > ones. (But nothing worth it is ever easy, and a PhyloCode without
> > > converted traditional names is not worth it.)"
> >
> > I'm really curious about this apparent consensus. How come?
>
> What would be the point of dreaming up new names for Mammalia,
> Sauropoda, Passeriformes, etc. when we already have perfectly good
> names in existence? If the PhyloCode avoided name conversion, anyone
> using it would have to learn an entirely new vocabulary.

Don't you have to do that anyway?

as things are, *Tyrannosaurus rex* is "Tyrannosaurus rex" whether its in a 
paper written in China, the US, Peru, or Iran.  everyone knows what a 
Tyrannosaurus is, what the name means, and what it's relations to other 
animals are.

> The basic point of the PhyloCode is to provide a simple framework for
> explicitly binding names to phylogenetic entities

I'd love to know what happens when an animal gets placed and named in 
PhyloCode, only to then be relocated to another place and name.  :D
(ie, how many times has the Hoatzin (as one example) been tossed from one 
group of birds to another?)

> (specifically
> clades, at least for the first version of the code). Declaring names
> covered by other codes off-limits would needlessly complicate matters.

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