rankless nomenclature

[Curtis Clark]

At 05:55 PM 10/15/00, Sigfrid Ingrisch wrote:
>Moreover, in practice, a binominal naming
>system is always superior to a uninominal system to give all the
>1,000,000,000(s) of taxa *unique* names.

It's ironic that Linnaeus initially proposed a polynomial naming system
that would have allowed for even more unique names. (It's also ironic that
he gets blamed today for the "Linnaean Hierarchy" that he never developed,
while during his lifetime he was blamed for the lascivious "sexual system"
that almost no one uses any more.)

At 05:13 PM 10/15/00, Thomas Lammers wrote:
>But I've seen this before.  Once the thing is in motion, they'll be in my
>sandbox, telling *me* how to play.  Look at our recent past and tell me
>I'm wrong.

When I look back to the early days of my career, I see systematists being
derided for their belief that classification should reflect kinship, simply
because a few loud contentious people shared their view. I can remember
when it was almost impossible to get a phylogenetic paper published in
Syst. Zool. (Yes, I'm that old. :-) I remember that NSF began
(appropriately, IMO) to favor hypothesis-directed research, which in
systematics at the time was largely the realm of the cladists. I remember
being surprised that molecular phenetics withered so quickly. I remember my
major professor, Don Kyhos, speculating that in the future we would know
the complete DNA sequences of organisms and thus be able to know their
phylogeny. I remember learning that the Barnadesiinae were the outgroup to
the rest of the Asteraceae, and realizing that I had not expected that
problem to be solved in my lifetime. Yes, a lot has happened. With the sole
exception that our subjects are becoming extinct faster than we can study
them, this is a Golden Age in systematics.


--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department             Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University      FAX: (909) 869-4078
Pomona CA 91768-4032  USA                  jcclark at csupomona.edu