[Taxacom] systematics eggs in one basket

[Ken Kinman]

John,
     Well, brainwashing might be a little too harsh a word.  Maybe I should 
say they are *conditioned* to believe paraphyly is unnatural and/or bad and 
therefore must be eliminated from formal nomenclature.  The important point 
is that electicists do not penalize strict cladists for recognizing 
holophyletic taxa, but strict cladists *do* penalize electicists for 
recognizing paraphyletic taxa.  Strict cladists have been the increasingly 
aggressive "alpha males" of taxonomy for over three decades now, but the 
internet is slowly allowing more talk of a counterrevolution (paradigm 
shift, if you will), and perhaps PhyloCode will be the straw that finally 
breaks the camel's back.  Then taxonomists will feel free to use 
paraphyletic taxa without fear of losing funding opportunities, having 
papers rejected, or other forms of harassment (subtle or otherwise).

     As for morphological and molecular data being incongruent, that just 
shows more work must be done to find character sets that *are* congruent.  
Ericson et al. (2006) is a step in the right direction for birds, and 
similar teams are making progress on other taxa.  Unfortunately, I doubt 
that any molecularist would want to team up with you given your extreme 
distrust of sequence data.

    Anyway, as I have said before, if you should also find convincing 
molecular evidence for your hypothesis, I would probably move my 
{{Hominidae}} exgroup marker up to the orangutan clade.  Until then, it will 
continue to be shown as clading with chimps.  Either way, the contents of 
Family Pongidae remain stable.  I don't think Australopithecines are likely 
to be removed from Hominidae, but you are welcome to try to show that 
orangutans are even closer to humans (that's going to be an even harder 
sell).  Anyway, if the orangutan hypothesis is correct, there should also be 
molecular evidence that is congruent with your morphological data.  I've 
seen no such molecular evidence, and it certainly isn't due to my not trying 
(I really tried, but with no success).  If the orangutan hypothesis is 
wrong, maybe you will have at least forced primatologists to produce a list 
of morphological synapomorphies that are congruent with their molecular 
data.
     ----Ken
**********************************
John Grehan wrote:

>This might be very nice sociology, but it is scientifically problematic
>since there is no objective recipe as to how to 'integrate' incongruent
>molecular and morphological data. Yes there are people who do that, but
>it is just an individual philosophy. Given that sequence alignment
>produces metaphysical homologies (i.e. they cannot be observed in
>nature) I am naturally more inclined to favor well supported
>morphological relationships over such sequence similarities. (yes that
>is my individual philosophy too).
>
<snip>
>
>Or one could say that some have been "virtually brainwashed into
>believing paraphyly" is natural and good. These are just different
>perspectives and neither involves brainwashing.
>
>John Grehan
>

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