Taxacom: strict cladists war against paraphyletic taxa

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-----Original Message-----
From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of Nicolas Bekkouche via Taxacom
Sent: 12 December 2025 01:07
To: Kenneth Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com>
"1) Yes this "war" against paraphyly works, it may never completely disappear, but most new definitions of taxa are based on monophyty and paraphyletic groups are way less used, and we can still understand each other"

Certainly for plants, less than half have been put in a phylogeny, and with the new techniques, it all has to be redone with different results.

"2) If it was such a disaster, in terms of stability, systematics would have completely died, and we wouldn't have been able to consistently use clades names over all this time. This prophecy should have happened if it were that bad. The thing is, many people manage to work and produce knowledge.
The corollary is that before cladistics, evolutionary systematics didn't collapse from total instability due to the subjectivity of grades."

This is more a reflection of how strong the shoulders are we stand on. Odd placements of families and genera have been confirmed by molecular phylogeny, the botanists that came before us were truly great in getting most families and genera right. It is only families where horticulturalists and nurserymen were involved that there were many issues (like Orchids and Cacti).

We are now entering a post-monophyly era where we se more and more monophyletic, especially large, genera being split up with names given to their different clades (. This should of course be done under the PhyloCode and is more disruptive than ending paraphyly.
Rafael

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