generic oversplitting (heart of the problem)

[John Grehan]

>And of course branding paraphyly as something
>to be reviled and attacked as though such taxa have no immediate common
>ancestor (as in polyphyly) is as absurd as it is destabilizing.

I thought the cladistic position was not that paraphyletic taxa have no
immediate common ancestor, but that the ancestor thus designated did not
include all the descendants.

>      And they want to institutionalize this into a separate Code??

"They" seems a bit ambiguous here as it seems to imply "they" refers to
cladists. If so this would seem to be a bit misleading as not all cladists
are necessarily in support of the code alternative and I recall that at
least one cladist made this position clear in an earlier posting.

John Grehan