Compromise in the air? (was: Boolean games)

[Ken Kinman]

Curtis,
     Tikes, I guess that wasn't compromise I smelled in the air after all.  :-)  Anyway, it seems evident that most of us don't want PhyloCode anywhere near our kitchens (at least in its present form, which smells a whole worse than a little paraphyly).  As for Archosauria, I did include it as one of my three "subclasses" of Reptilia.  Remember?

     As for the fluidity of strict cladifications, the nesting has actually turned into one "house of cards" after another when applied to amphibians and reptiles.  That kind of fluidity yields perpetual instability!!!  At least we do agree that eliminating ranks is a terrible mistake.  As for intersecting properties, I only intersect by using Kinman markers for exgroups (and that is an advantage because it allows formal paraphyly without losing sister group information).  The Kinman System retains ranks, is minimally intersecting (and does so in a cladistic, informative manner).  It is fully nested, but with carefully placed paraphyletic breaks that avoid the pitfalls of strict cladism while maintaining the multiple advantages of limited eclecticism.  Paraphyly does NOT have to destroy a nested system, and for taxa like Amphibia, it avoids those cladistic "houses of cards".  Maybe I should try reasoning with Cantino once again.  Of all the phylocodists, he seems to most willing to compromise (and not surprisingly, he is a botanist).  I know I said this before, but I really am tired of arguing with Curtis.
     ---Ken Kinman
P.S.  Yikes, Pteridophyta has been reduced to a smaller clade as well?  No wonder Tom Lammers is complaining!!  The bullies grabbed yet another pile of sand from our sandbox when I wasn't looking.  Will the strict cladists please stop hijacking our names and changing their meaning.  This is "intersecting" of the worst kind, and just makes PhyloCode even more incompatible with the other Codes.
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Curtis Clark wrote:
Shit is natural, too, but I don't want it in my kitchen....
The Kinman System notwithstanding, basic textbooks that talk about Class Reptilia cannot simultaneously deal with Archosauria as a formal taxon *at any rank*....

Because Phylocode is unranked (and I agree with Norm Platnick that this is more of a shortcoming than an advantage), even a single paraphyletic group destroys the system (or, more specifically, destroys any non-intersecting properties it has), because it has the potential to intersect and thus preclude any other taxon (remember than in Phylocode there is a fluidity in which today's "A is a subclade of B" can be tomorrow's "B is a subclade of "A" when new evidence is presented)....   For a system to be composed of groups that are simultaneously unranked and non-intersecting, they have to be nested.