RE: Monotremes

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

(I vaguely remember I claimed I'd retreat to the PhyloCode forum... OK, after 
this post:)

> I've no problem with that....my concern is that people interested in 
> paleontology *might be frightened away* by the idea of having to phrase 
> everything in cladograms.
> 
> (and before you say "oh its easy", I'll clarify - I don't mean drawing
> a cladogram, I mean speaking a cladogram)

There are still taxa, and they still have names. These names are now defined in 
terms of ancestry and no longer in terms of type and rank. That's the whole 
deal.

Sure, you have to think in trees, you can't think in boxes. But the requirement 
for tree-thinking in biology is not new.

"Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution"
(Dobzhansky, 1970s or earlier)

"Nothing makes sense in evolution without a good phylogeny"
(G. Gould and coauthors, 2004 or so)
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