[Taxacom] FW: LOL (was Re: New lizard species)

[Curtis Clark]

On 6/10/2010 12:03 PM, Jason Mate wrote:
> Although I disagree with (but respect) most of Richard´s comments I must say that strict adherence to monophyly is a potential headache: beautifully logical but a practical mess. Stem groups do serve a purpose, if nothing more than a convenient bric-a-brac box, in particular in paleontology.
Those used to be called "plesions". There's nothing wrong with grades as 
taxa (in fact, one might imagine, or at least I might imagine, a 
classification made entirely of grades). But mixing grades and clades 
is, to use computer science terminology, overloading the classification.


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