Blaming the victim (the Linnaean System)

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Kipling Will wrote:
>
> As you say the non-expert knows he/she has an Insect and so can
> immediately discount all other Classes of Animals that are in other
> parts of the book or library. Not so with a rank-less system since
> Insecta could mean any part of the hierarchy from populations to all
> life. It makes no exclusive statement without a rank or without a
> phylogeny at hand.

* I'm not sure what I'm being misunderstood as saying here - all I'm
proposing to abandon is categories - the name and taxon Insecta are
still there, with all the rules for forming names, and all the
relationships with super-ordinate and sub-ordianate taxa - it's just
that I'm not saying that Insecta is a something called a "Class" -
whatever that may mean beyond Insecta traditionally being called a
Class.

fred.
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