Use of the rank of forma

[Zdenek Skala]

T. Lammers wrote:
>area highlights just how silly it is to give names to individual
>variants that do not have a discrete geographical or ecological
>range, i.e., that occur sporadically within populations.

Barry Roth wrote:
>Or, more generally, to give names to units that are
>not conceived as monophyletic.  At least with the hope
>that such names will designate entities about which
>one can make the same kinds of predictions that
>monophyletic units allow one to make -- e.g., that all
>of its members will share other, known or
>undiscovered, characters.

Taxonomy, even the modern one in my opinion, is not about the
phylogeny but about the diversity; phylogenetic hypothesis is only
one tool to reasonably describe this diversity. If so - why to discard
the infraspecific variation from the taxonomic scope?
Of course, infraspecific taxa cannot be monophyletic by definition -
not because they have no common origin, but because the
operational unit of phylogeny in phylogenetic analysis is species.
To apply the monophyly criterion to taxa describing individual
variation is simply nonsense, but this apply to subspecies as well.
Taxonomy is here to learn as much as possible about the diversity
and "variants that do not have a discrete geographical or ecological
range" often (not always) contribute much to this knowledge.
BTW, the infraspecific taxonomy can often contribute also to the
cladistic analysis, since it is often hard to find even one species-
specific character that is *really* invariable... (think about the
homeotic variations in flower plan etc.). This is a good point to
show how the methodology utilized drives our theoretical thoughts -
in cladistic analysis we need morpologically homogeneous
operational units, so we create them :-)
Best!
Zdenek
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] Zdenek Skala
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