Farewell to Species - reticulation

[Thomas DiBenedetto]

my name, Schlemmermeyer, is not at least a little bit indicative of
any geneaological relationship besides the patriline of my father.
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Oh, and the "patriline" is not a geneaological relationship?
But geez, Tomas, it was an _analogy_. By defintion analogies are not
_examples_, they are situations in which there are some similarities and
some differences. The point of an analogy is to focus on the similarities
and to ignore the differences, because one uses the analogy to elucidate a
similarity. If I say to my girlfriend that her lips are like rubies, I would
hope she doesnt understand me to say that her lips are cold and hard like a
stone. It would be the similarities (the color) not the differences that I
would be referring to.
Obviously (I would have thought) I was referring to the fact that
genealogical history is a crucially important factor in understanding who we
as humans are. Most human cultures try to refer to that, in one way or
another, when we name individuals. And the genealogical history of lineages
is also a crucial factor in understanding taxa, and so we wish to reflect
that in our naming system as well. But I obviously did not say anything
about taxonomists reconstructing tokogenetic relationships or anything like
that.

Tom DiBenedetto
tdib at dccmc.org