[Taxacom] the cladists are revolting!

[Stephen Thorpe]

thanks John - though not sure I was representing or misrepresenting anything at all, but just trying to give the post a "smart ass" title ...

cladists who don't attempt to reinvent taxonomy/nomenclature are of course less than revolting, but a lack of necessity doesn't imply that something won't happen or be lobbied for. After all, biological classification doesn't necessarily have any relation whatever to phylogeny, but could just be an information retrieval system. Cladists could study phylogeny independently of classification/taxonomy. But they don't ...

The danger is that people with the hardcore cladist ideology described in the article will increasingly gain positions of power (in universities, and/or as journal editors) where they can reject the work of others for not following the chosen doctrine, and/or that funders will favour those who follow the doctrine ...

Stephen




________________________________
From: John Grehan <jgrehan at sciencebuff.org>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Thu, 6 May, 2010 8:43:47 AM
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] the cladists are revolting!


What is more revolting is the way Stephen thorpe is misrepresenting the phylocode as a necessarily cladist position when it is not.
 
John Grehan

________________________________
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu on behalf of Stephen Thorpe
Sent: Wed 5/5/2010 4:40 PM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: [Taxacom] the cladists are revolting!


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6369-linnean-naming-system-faces-challengers.html
well, they were revolting in 2004, and I bet they haven't improved ...


     
_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:

(1) http://taxacom.markmail.org

Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here