Farewell to species (but not yet!)

[Don Colless]

        For what it's worth, may I enter my wholehearted
agreement with P.F.Stevens and Hubert Turner. Indeed, I'm
delighted to discover that sanity still exists in some places out
there in the world of taxonomy. The only thing that's "broke" in
the Linnean system - and that might need "fixing" - is that a
classification MAY not be 100% isomorphic with a cladogram; and
therefore (horror of horrors) might lead to misleading inferences
in, say, biogeography. But if the cladogram is available,the
biogeographer can use THAT more easily than any classification.
And the rest of us wouldn't be plagued with problems of UTILITY
of a classification.

        It's pretty ancient now, but I might recommend a paper to
be found in Sys. Zool. 1977, 26:349-352.


          ******************************************
          *  Don Colless, CSIRO Div of Entomology, *
          *     PO Box 1700 CANBERRA. ACT. 2601    *
          *       (donc at spider.ento.csiro.au)      *
          *      Tuz li munz est miens envirun     *
          ******************************************