[Taxacom] burn out (was: classification of Class Rosopsida)

[Richard Zander]

Well, I got descender and descendee mixed up in my post. The descender
addresses an action to the descendee, as in payer and payee. Ignore that
and probably also the comment about phylog + genetics, which was
doubtless vainglory. 

The ancestor of Aves is the closest paraphyletic taxon. A natural taxon,
that is, not a holophyletic taxon.  If there are no paraphyletic taxa
presently evident, then perhaps we have not studied enough (long
isolated) exemplars of the same taxon, on a large scale. 

There are other ways of identifying ancestors, e.g. in the most clear
case, a taxon with a wide and long term distribution in geologically
stable habitats, versus a similar taxon in a narrow, recent habitat,
with double the chromosome number of the other. The first is
hypothetically the ancestor (descender) of the second (descendee). 

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Richard H. Zander 
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-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Curtis Clark
Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2009 4:45 PM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] burn out (was: classification of Class Rosopsida)

On 2009-04-12 12:01, Richard Zander wrote:
> Actually, there is neither "phylo" nor "genetic" in "phylogenetic." In
a
> phylogenetic cladogram with paraphyly eliminated, we know what the
> descender is, it is the exemplar, but we don't know what the descendee
> is, it is only a node, without diagnosis or any real biological
> attribute.

So what's the descendee of an autophyletic Aves, in your view?

-- 
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Director, I&IT Web Development                   +1 909 979 6371
University Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona

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