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

[Curtis Clark]

On 2009-04-13 06:50, Richard Zander wrote:
> The ancestor of Aves is the closest paraphyletic taxon.

What's your metric for "closest"? For all your criticisms of the 
weaknesses of parsimony analysis, this seems rather vague. Do you mean 
number of generations, phenetic similarity, or what? I assume Aves had 
to descend from it. Do you mean at the same rank (whatever that means 
analytically), or what?

I can think of analytical approaches to grade taxa (I have mentioned 
them, but no one seemed interested), and I don't find grade taxa 
valuable. It seems to me that their proponents should either be able to 
do as well or else explain why analysis is unnecessary and what 
substitutes for it.

-- 
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
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