Ernst Mayr and "Life"

[Curtis Clark]

At 09:47 PM 9/13/99 -0400, Susan B. Farmer wrote:
>For those of you who don't like the ever-popular Five Kingdom Scheme,
>which version of a Global Classification do you prefer?

Until I can count them, I don't speculate on how many angels can dance on
the head of a pin. I feel the same way about kingdom-level classification.
It is not heuristic, it is bad pedagogy, and, like most classification, it
tends to get stuck in textbooks long after it has lost any usefulness it
might have had. I regard kingdom-level classification as conceit, not
science, and I have better things to be conceited about. :-)


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Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
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