[Taxacom] save Prokaryota!!! (was: Knocking Hennig off his pedestal

[Fred Schueler]

Quoting Ken Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com>:

> "Cladifications" are also often very asymmetric and thus unbalanced  
> (which can add to instability), making them even harder to remember  
> (and often harder for the general user to even understand).  This  
> has resulted in an explosion of new clade names (many of which  
> eventually turn out to be invalid) as well as a proliferation of  
> categories that is so extreme that calls for the elimination of  
> Linnaean categories naturally followed (but one shouldn't abuse a  
> useful tool like that and then complain when problems arise).

* well, my objections to categories are not based on such a  
proliferation, but on the simple Amniote/Reptile/Bird/Mammal  
situation, and on the incomparability of a category such as "Family"  
across various higher taxa. Unfortunately, i don't get to write many  
sytematic listings of species, but since 1990 i've been composing the  
ones I do without categories, and remarkably little seems to be lost  
from them.

>  And it seems to me that Prokaryota (a paraphyletic group of  
> species) is just as valid and important as Eukaryota (a holophyletic  
> group of species).

* but if Eukaryota are a symbiotic amalgamation of Prokaryote  
lineages, how does the concept of "monophyly" apply - aren't the  
Eukaryotes supposed to be ancestrally multiphyletic? (since  
"polyphyletic" is already taken for its conventional meaning).

fred.
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