Phylocode, Cladistics and Eclecticism ...

[Ken Kinman]

     I'll try to explain this once more from a different perspective.  If
others want to argue with you in another long thread, more power to them,
but I just don't have the time or patience for another long thread about
this ("deja vu" feelings of frustration and stalemate are already creeping
in).
     To use your mother-daughter + daughter way of looking at it, the
mother-daughter is still one species, while the other daughter has one or
more apomorphies (changes are necessary for its speciation to occur).
     What I am saying is that any sister group splitting occurs at a
*population* level.  Populations (groups of individuals) can have a sister
group relationship, but the apomorphic population starts out small and
should be regarded as a budding off of the original mother population.  This
is a natural evolutionary event which automatically truncates the mother
leaving her a paraphyletic entity, and the daughter species is an exgroup.
Regarding them as sisters is just a convention.  In my opinion you can't
divorce relationships and characters without invoking arbitrary definitions
of taxa (and that is just semantic smoke and mirrors).
     I'm sure Mayr and Ashlock 1991 (Principles of Systematic Zoology) must
have explained this better than I can.  And Robert Carroll (in his 1988
vertebrate paleontology book) discusses how paraphyly is an inevitable
result of evolution.  I just don't have any more patience with this subject
at this time, so others can continue this thread if they want.  I'm just
getting a headache from it.
         -----Sincerely,  Ken Kinman



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