[Re:] RE: Farewell to Species - reticulation

[Thomas Schlemmermeyer]

It is OK Tom, so it was thought as an analogy! But analogy does not set one
free of responsibility. Rather the writer should ponder carefully on the
intended analogy in order not to die "by his own arms" (vow, please take that
as an analogy only)

And in fact I heard saying that today's phylogeneticists often use to praise
the fact that phylogeny can be traced back into levels inferior to the species,
namely interfamiliar, intercolony relationships and so on.

While the species, however, is understood as a single terminal point of a
dichotomous branching pattern, the organismic individual rather should be seen
as a point on which many different branches converge (through sexual
intercourse). The branching pattern is sort of in the other direction. But
maybe it is exactly here where reticulation comes into play and maybe I ought
to read the whole thread again, as I lost the point what it is all about.

On ( Tue, 15 Feb 2000 08:27:27 -0500
), Thomas DiBenedetto <TDibenedetto at DCCMC.ORG> wrote:


>my name, Schlemmermeyer, is not at least a little bit indicative of
>any geneaological relationship besides the patriline of my father.
>-----------------------
>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
>


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Thomas Schlemmermeyer
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