Re: The Papers That Ate Cincinnati

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On 5/5/07, evelyn sobielski <koreke77@yahoo.de> wrote:
> The point is rather than non-monophyletic descent
> *also* exists, and not actually little of it.

Descent is descent. One organism's genes are copied into a new
organism. I can't make sense of the phrase "non-monophyletic descent".
Groups are monophyletic, not descent itself.

The goal of the PhyloCode is the ability to unambiguously associate a
name with a group. If a group does not consist of one ancestor and all
of its descendants, then it doesn't get a clade name under the
PhyloCode.

The methods provided by the PhyloCode for defining clades work: they
will always yield one ancestor and all descendants thereof, or a null
set in the case of potentially self-destructing definitions. If you'd
like to discuss how this works mathematically, please contact me
off-list.

> The point seems not that phylogenies are unfeasible as
> a classification framework

As David pointed out, phylogenetic nomenclature is not classification;
it's an alternative to classification.
--
Mike Keesey