List order (was: Maximum Taxon names within a single Parent)

[Barry Roth]

 And I grew up with seashell publications that put the cowries and cones first because they were popular with collectors.  Obviously many kinds of "feelings" have gone into the construction of lists over the years.  I should have written "sometimes" rather than "generally."
I think it is useful to have some explicit convention that encourages consistency in presentation.  And a convention (or set of conventions) that is strictly mechanistic (e.g., "less ramified clade first") may help avoid introducing or perpetuating bias from subjective ideas about the organisms themselves.
Barry Roth
  Tony Irwin <tony.irwin at BTINTERNET.COM> wrote: Barry-
Non-alphabetic listing of species was commonplace at all taxonomic levels
for British insect checklists in the pre-cladistics days of long ago. I
don't think it had much to do with assumptions of what was primitive or
advanced, but was an attempt on the part of the author to express possible
relationships between species. More closely related species were grouped
together, species pairs were .... in pairs.
In most cases, I suspect the order of listing was irrelevant - it was the
proximity of names within the lists that mattered. The grouping of species
may often have been dictated by a "feeling" on the part of the author -
essentially it was an (often unconscious) process of character analysis
derived from great familiarity with the group. Comparison of the old lists
with modern ones usually shows that the species are in much the same
groups - just these days they get their own genus or subgenus. This sequence
information was not "misguided". It was a valid means of expressing opinion
about relationships. And no more misguided than our current attempts will
appear to be in fifty years time!

Tony Irwin

----- Original Message -----
From: "Barry Roth"
To:
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2002 5:30 PM
Subject: List order (was: Maximum Taxon names within a single Parent)


> I have seen this practice too, and it generally proceeds from at least a
tacit assumption that there are "advanced" and "primitive" species --
ignoring the fact that "advanced" and "primitive" are attributes of
character-states and that most taxa are mosaics of both. My question is why
would one wish to capture this sequence information -- misguided, in my
opinion -- in the first place. Clearly, expressing taxa in a single linear
sequence (as required in a list), when the relations between the component
taxa are those of a tree, has its limitations. Because in a cladogram,
paired branches can be rotated at a node without changing the meaning, which
of those branches is listed first has no significance in itself. To choose
the order, you have to rely on some external principle -- alphabetic order
would serve; it just must be recognized for the convention that it is. I
have sometimes used the convention of treating the less-ramified of two
branches first. In other words, if a clade contains two terminal taxa and
its sister-group contains four terminal taxa, I would list/treat the former
first. I imagine this is more efficient than the other way around. In a
monograph, if there is a key to the component species, it may make sense to
treat the species in the order that they key out -- not for any phylogenetic
reason but just as a convenience to the reader. It would be interesting to
hear other ideas on conventions for list order.
> Barry Roth
> Richard Pyle wrote: Throughout much of the
history of taxonomic nomenclature, many authors of
> References have attempted to convey/assert their interpretations of
> phylogenetic placement of same-rank taxon names by listing those names in
a
> non-alphabetical sequence within their respective parent taxon names. For
> instance, in many published fish checklists, the families are arranged in
> some sort of "phylogenetic" sequence, rather than simple alphabetical
order.
> I would like to provide a means in my database of capturing this
> sorting-within-parent information, as asserted by authors of said
> references. In the vast majority of cases, this practice of conveying
> phylogeny through name seqencing is limited to the rank of family and
> higher. However, there are some taxonomic references that have extended
the
> practice to lower-level ranks as well.
>
>
>
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