bau-plans and cladistics

[Barry Roth]

Excuse me, but I think this premise is flawed.  Words
undergo complex histories that often decouple them (to
use a word that has become popular round here, with
good reason) from their deep origins.  We can
"ostracize" someone without any need to be conscious
that votes to expel were once written on potsherds or
tiles (ostracon), themselves named with metaphoric
reference to seashells.  I believe linguists refer to
the concept that by knowing the origins of a word you
know its meaning as "the etymological fallacy."

The attempt to analogize etymology with a taxonomic
philosophy also seems flawed to me, and
phenetically-driven as well.  The real bugbear in so
much opposition to rank-free taxonomy seems to be "too
many names," but I am not sure this is a problem -- at
least for persons literally _using_, not just totting
up, the taxa of a classification.  One's working
vocabulary expands readily to accommodate nouns in
active use.  (I estimate that, in my days as a
collection manager in a large museum, I had a ready
vocabulary of about 5,000 mollusk names -- entities I
could recognize and manipulate without reference to a
book or specimen.  It's one of those "use it or lose
it" things, and I couldn't do the same right now.  But
if sometime I needed to do it to keep my job ... who
knows?)

I've heard the "chain of command" argument too, told
quite colorfully at a malacological meeting.  But
there, as here, it was a bogus analogy.  And are
things military really the best evidence for "how our
brains organize information"? ;^)

Barry Roth

--- Ken Kinman <kinman at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
>      I think you have to dig more deeply into the
> meanings of words to
> really understand their ultimate origins.
>      Bau in German means earth or ground, a burrow
> in the ground,
> cultivation of crops in the ground, the ground or
> foundation upon which
> buildings are built.  Bauer means farmer.  Bauen
> also means to cultivate or
> grow (in the "ground"), as well as to build (on the
> ground).  The
> terminology for farming and building seem to be
> linked in some way if we go
> back far enough.  Bauplans are the groundplans or
> basic "structural" plans
> which underlie the diversity of life on Earth.
>      And to tie this in with the PhyloCode
> discussion, I favor
> classifications which reflect broad bauplans, plus a
> limited number of
> subdivisions (in a limited hierarchy of
> subdivisions---the main Linnean
> ranks).
>      The PhyloCode, on the other hand, will only
> perpetuate the strict
> cladists' practice of aiming at a virtually
> unlimited hierarchy of finely
> split subdivisions, which goes against the grain of
> how our brains organize
> information.  If the strict cladists organized our
> armies, the chain of
> command would be so long that it would cease to
> function.  Hierarchies need
> some balance and limits to function well.

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