Platnick's view of Phylocode

[Ken Kinman]

     Well, at least I'm glad you are paying attention to what Norman had to
say, especially about PhyloCode makes a big mess of nomenclature with no
advantages.  It's pretty much all pain and no gain.  Of course, Norman is
still a strict cladist, but the pattern cladists are in many ways more
moderate, perhaps because they tend to be older and more experienced than
the majority of the phylocode crowd (there are obvious exceptions to that
trend).
     I get the impression you think the Kinman System is useless without the
coding.  Actually, a majority of people who use biological classifications
can just ignore the coding, and enjoy the benefits of a relative stable list
of more traditional taxa.  The coding is mainly for evolutionary biologists
who need information on the interrelationships of those taxa.  And you would
be surprised how readily many dinosaur systematists on DML understand my
coding, even though they don't like my recognition of paraphyletic taxa.
The expanded Aves classification I am working on is sometimes translated by
them into a cladogram, which makes them more comfortable.  I am still
working on ways to make such coding even more user-friendly.
     The point is that my classifications are basically encoded cladograms,
with an occasional paraphyletic break (at major gaps) to reflect major
evolutionary events (the amphibian transition to land, the transition to the
amniotic egg, the transition of fuzzy dinosaurs into feathered birds).
Strict cladists are drowning important information in a labyrinth of
legalistic nomenclature.  As Peter Dodson said, this is not progress----it's
obfuscation.
     The meaning of Class Amphibia is very widely understood (from
professionals to grade-schoolers).  But how many professionals even know
what "Clade" Amphibia includes or how it is related to "Clade" Reptilia?
There a number of nodes between them, so one can't say something as clear as
"reptiles evolved from amphibians", because strict cladism had hijacked
these terms and restricted their meanings into something only the cladistic
elite feel comfortable with.  It's Ivory Tower snobbery and it just won't
work in the long term (it's hasn't even worked very well in the short term).
  Luckily for the botanists, most of this mess occurred in zoological
nomenclature, and botany will hopefully learn from our mistakes.
     The benefits we have derived from cladistics is due to cladistic
*analysis*, NOT phylogenetic (purely cladistic) nomenclature and
classification.  That shows you how powerful cladistic analysis can be, that
it has achieved so much IN SPITE OF all the nomenclatural mess.  It will
also be an even more powerful analytic technique once we get past this
overreliance on strict parsimony.  Moderation in all things!   So I would
agree with Peter Stevens that too much time is spent arguing over
nomenclature, but it is strict cladism which has generated the higher level
of argumentation (and all because they choose to destroy all formal
paraphyletic groups rather than make them cladistically useful).
       ---------- Ken
******************************************
>From: Curtis Clark <jcclark at CSUPOMONA.EDU>
>Reply-To: Curtis Clark <jcclark at CSUPOMONA.EDU>
>To: TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG
>Subject: Platnick's view of Phylocode
>Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 23:24:09 -0800
>
>I read over Norm Platnick's article about Phylocode again, and I've decided
>he has made some very good points. He says, "So, let's see, we have John's
>salticid and either the Linnaean hierarchy, with 158 million predictions
>about spiders alone, or the NB system, with no useful predictions at all."
>It is important to note that a system that admits paraphyletic taxa
>(Linnaean or not) makes exactly as many useful predictions as a node-based
>system.  It is ironic that the originator of Ken's beloved "dephylocode"
>has condemned not only Phylocode, but also Ken's system, where knowing a
>name (only, without Ken's involved notation) is no more useful than it is
>in Phylocode.
>
>--
>Curtis Clark




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