[Taxacom] Usefulness vs. convenience (Protista)

[Curtis Clark]

On 12/19/2010 12:33 PM, Kleo Pullin wrote:
> I can see how Protista is useful;
I never saw Protista as useful. Back when I was an undergraduate (in the 
early Holocene) and first learned about "protists", I thought "Someday 
we'll know enough about these organisms to divide them into additional 
kingdoms." I was primed for this by an elementary-school exercise where 
I gathered magazine pictures of "mammals", "birds", "reptiles", 
"amphibians", "fish", and "all others". Decades later, when I learned 
the term "paraphyletic", I realized that every paraphyletic group is an 
"all others" just waiting to be analyzed.

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