[Taxacom] Save Order Bromeliales

[Kenneth Kinman]

Hi Richard and Ashley,
       I agree with what Richard, except for APG being "the" bugbear of
our times.  In my opinion, the real bugbears are vertebrate
paleontologists who are the main ones trying to shove PhyloCode down our
throats.  Largely comprised of dinosaurologists who study reptiles, but
won't recognize a Class Reptilia.   
      At least the APG is reasonable enough that I actually have some
hope that they might reverse some of their ordinal lumping eventually.
Arguing with the PhyloCode dinosaurologists is so hopeless that it seems
the epitome of bugbear nightmares.  And like you said, APG has done a
lot more good than harm.  The dinosaur PhyloCoders seem to have done a
lot less good and a lot more harm.    
     Anyway, I definitely agree with Ashley that dumping Bromeliales
into Poales was not helpful for most endusers.  But as I said above, I
believe the endusers of botany have a better chance of influencing APG
than vertebrate endusers have much of chance with the main PhyloCoder
crowd.         
     -----------Ken              
  
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Richard wrote:              
What can I say, Ken? APG is the bugbear of our times, not because it is
all bad. That would be too much to ask. It mixes together plenty of
good, new advances with lumping or splitting because of artificial
systems of classification, i.e. holophyly, as you say, and grouping by
molecular continuity and splits (rather than a combination of that plus
clear cases of macroevolution). 
Linnaean classification does not directly represent either cladistic
nesting or macroevolution, but we can use its nesting and contiguity
(read "lists") of names to group evolutionarily related taxa without
eliminating names because of paraphyly. Thus, the problem that Linnaean
classification does not directly reflect processes in nature can work in
its favor by providing a neutral ground representing a diversity of
apprehensions of evolutionary processes.