[Taxacom] Wikispecies as an open alternative to Catalogue of Life

[Kenneth Kinman]

Gee John,
       If you are so upset about minority reconstructions being
excluded, I would think you would actually embrace a traditional,
paraphyletic Family Pongidae (for orangutans, chimps and gorillas).  A
Global Hierarchy using such a taxon is thus consistent with either
chimps or orangutans being sister to Family Hominidae, or even my
minority inclination that it could be a chimp-gorilla clade that is
sister group to Family Hominidae.         

      But instead of embracing such a traditional taxon for the "Global
Hierarchy", you are just as guilty as the chimp-hominid folks in
insisting that "we know best" and want a strict cladification (even
though the strict cladifications are incompatible with one another).  It
seems to me that it is just such cases where paraphyletic taxa are the
most useful and stable, and I am willing to admit that any of the above
groupings could be sister group to Family Hominidae.  Strict cladists
apparently just don't care about stablility in such cases.  They would
rather just continue to fight each other over their incompatible strict
phylogenies.           
               ---------Ken 
  
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John Grehan wrote:
       Another problem with 'global hierarchies' is that they can end up
being exclusive of minority reconstructions and treat the accepted
phylogeny as somehow having the true reality. This occurs in the Tree of
Life project which is based only on a molecular reconstruction for
humans and the great apes (I tried proposing the representation of both
trees but that was dismissed). People may have the power of being
selective about phylogeny, but it can misrepresent the reality of
phylogenetic research in at least some cases. 
John Grehan