renaming genera (rankless)

[Philip Cantino]

Ken Kinman wrote:

>      When you have an animal genus and plant genus spelled the same, how
>will you determine which gets replaced?  In many cases, you are going to
>have either unhappy botanists or unhappy zoologists.
>      But leaving that aside, what will you do when one of the names is a
>genus and the other is a higher taxon.  For instance, Archaea is a genus of
>spider, and it is also one of Woese's Three Domains of Life.
>      Does the spider genus get renamed because it is a lower taxon, or
>rename Domain Archaea because it was named later.  Of course you could
>always side-step the issue by using the name Metabacteria, which has
>priority over Woese's name anyway (and the name is also more appropriate).
>But these are the kinds of things you are going to encounter (plus others
>that you probably never anticipated).
>


The rules of precedence will determine which name gets replaced.  The
first published definition for a name is the accepted one unless a
later definition is conserved over an earlier one.  Such conservation
decisions will probably be infrequent, but if a widely known name
that currently applies to a large and/or culturally important group
of (for example) plants were first established under the PhyloCode as
the name of a small and culturally unimportant clade of (for example)
animals, it is likely that the governing committee would conserve its
later application to the plant clade.

In the interesting example you cite, if the first published
definition of Archaea under the PhyloCode established it as the name
of a clade of spiders, it is quite possible that the committee would
decide to conserve a later application of the name to the domain of
archaebacteria.  If this were done, the decision would not be based
simply on the higher rank of the latter but on the fact that the name
Archaea sensu Woese is far more widely known than the spider genus
name.

Phil





Philip D. Cantino
Professor and Chair
Department of Environmental and Plant Biology
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701-2979
U.S.A.

Phone: (740) 593-1128; 593-1126
Fax: (740) 593-1130
e-mail: cantino at ohio.edu