Farewell to species - reticulation

[Biology at]

>>And why not assign it its own name? Eg.
species 3. The higher taxon is the monophyletic group consisting of ancestral
taxon 3 (species 3!) and all its descendants (branches/species 2 and 1). Because
rchaeopteryx "solnhoferi" (I'm just making up a name here, to avoid confusion
between a species and a clade) gave rise to all species we recognise as "Aves"
today, doesn't mean that Aves should be replaced by "clade Archaeopteryx
solnhoferi" or vice versa, that Archaeopteryx solnhoferi should be
renamed "Aves".<<

Following this (mostly)interesting discussion about the benefit of cladistics
and classification (which split dichotomously a couple of times now into several
subdicussion), I would appreciate if any concepts, ideas or arguments could be
made more transparent, e.g. by using examples as Hubert did in his thread above.

For example, I completely missed the actual point of the first part of the
following contribution because it could mean a lot of different things:

"If most speciation is budding (paraphyletic), then you cannot cut a continuous
tree of life without creating paraphyletic group."


Stefan Koenemann
Old Dominion University
Dept. of Biological Sciences
Norfolk, VA 235299-0266
USA
Tel: (757) 683-3606
Fax: (757) 683-5283
email: biolgrad at odu.edu
http://www.odu.edu/~jrh100f/sk
http://www.odu.edu/~jrh100f/amphipod