[Taxacom] New paper: Ruggiero et al. "A Higher Level Classification of All Living Organisms"

[Richard Zander]

Maybe now is the time to add my perspective, backing up that of Ken.

Phylogenetic classification is artificial. Artificial classifications use one set of traits to group taxa, e.g., molecular races, shared traits (only). Artificial classifications are repeatable, yet repeatability is not the only requirement of science. Alphabetization is repeatable. 

Principles of phylogenetic classification are artificial. Some principles include strict monophyly (so long Aves), putting known taxa at the top of a tree of relationships ("tree-thinking") rather than in the tree when known (stem-thinking), ignoring the probability of extinct paraphyly that casts doubt on molecular trees, ignoring the evolutionary importance of autapomorphies, asserting that only zero length branches imply a surviving ancestral taxon, pretending that a cladogram is "the evidence" (when it is only some evidence) and evolutionary theory is mere narrative . . . you can probably think of more phylogenetic principles of classification that do violence to evolutionary theory developed only after long struggle with artificial classifiers of the past.

Classification by phylogenetic principles is actually quite unprincipled, and serves only to preserve a modification of older methods of numerical taxonomy. 

Richard


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Richard H. Zander
Missouri Botanical Garden – 4344 Shaw Blvd. – St. Louis – Missouri – 63110 – USA
richard.zander at mobot.org 
Web sites: http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/bfna/bfnamenu.htm and http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/ 


-----Original Message-----
From: Taxacom [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Nico Franz
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 12:16 PM
To: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] New paper: Ruggiero et al. "A Higher Level Classification of All Living Organisms"

Computational logic? Nico

Reasoning over taxonomic change:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118247
Taxonomy - for computers: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/09/022145

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Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2015
From: Kenneth Kinman

Hi Stephen,
       Logically, we must remember that [...] _______________________________________________
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