Google for Internet Database of all life, and existing initiatives already doing this

Ken Kinman kinman2 at YAHOO.COM
Tue Mar 21 09:51:06 CST 2006


John,
     In all fairness, I should applaud Species 2000 for resisting a Three Domain classification (although I would at least change "Archaea" to Archaebacteria).  However, if you are going to split up Protista, you should at least do a clean job of it.  Don't list a bunch of extraneous phyla in Plantae and also list them in Protozoa and Chromista.  You don't want the top levels of your classification to be this messy and redundant.
      ----Ken Kinman
P.S.  And within Chromista, why not a Phylum Heterokonta, instead of chopping it up into subgroups very few people have heard of (Sagenista, Ochrophyta, etc.).  It reminds me of what the Tree of Life has done to the classification of tetrapod vertebrates.  Try browsing your way through that some time.   Much of this unnecessary clutter just gets in the way of the purpose of a general classification.  NCBI has done a fairly decent job of classifying extant life---I periodically pick on them here and there, but they are way ahead of Species2000 on ironing out the problems.




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