Consensus (end paraphyletic "Prohibition")

[Ken Kinman]

Curtis,
      It is no more a slur than them saying that those who use paraphyletic taxa are practicing bad science and/or erecting unnatural, unscientific groupings.  Trouble is that the most aggressive of those Ivory Tower types appear to have given little or no thought to how this would affect their taxonomist colleagues or non-taxonomist biologists (much less the "masses", and even they deserve some consideration).

    No, they plunged ahead like a bunch of Carrie Nations and thought a total "Prohibition" would solve the problem of inexplicit paraphyly.  Well, it didn't work for alcohol, and there is good evidence that a little bit now and then is good for you if you're not prone to alcoholism.  Therefore, I think that the time to repeal "Paraphyletic Prohibition" is way overdue.  So yeah, I guess you could say I have an axe to grind, but only against those who stand in the way of real consensus building (and have the gall to say we are erecting unnatural taxa and practicing bad science).  And don't forget that a paraphyletic group containing an {{exgroup}} marker is effectively a holophyletic group in an informational sense, so it's not like I am a reactionary who wants to return to the bad old days of inexplicit paraphyly.
  -----Ken Kinman
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Curtis wrote:
This is a slur.  It marks you for what you are, not a consensus-builder, but rather someone with an axe to grind. A lot of those "Ivory Tower types" have embraced monophyly because it fits best with the new facts about actual organisms that they discovered and published.
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