[Taxacom] Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?
Stephen Thorpe
stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz
Thu Feb 8 20:28:42 CST 2018
Lumping supraspecific taxa (genera etc.) is totally different to lumping at the species level!
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 9/2/18, Socorro Gonzalez <herbario_ciidir at yahoo.com.mx> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?
To: "Mary Barkworth" <Mary.Barkworth at usu.edu>, "Stephen Thorpe" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>, "taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu" <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>, "Michael A. Ivie" <mivie at montana.edu>
Received: Friday, 9 February, 2018, 3:16 PM
I
totally agree Mary. Lumping is the easiest way. Or,
as Leme (2003) put it, lumping may cause "nominal
extinction".
Taxonomists
have a lot of responsibility on the fate of organisms. If we
reduce to synonymy a name we shall be totally certain that
it is just part of the variation of the taxon under we are
puting it. But it is common to lump because people see
"gradients" when in reality there are two or more
different taxa involved. In many cases, those lumped names
represent endemic or scarcely known species. After that,
they are not longer included in official lists of taxa for
conservation or in ecological and floristic lists. That
contributes to reduced evaluations of the biodiversity and,
at long, to its actual reduction.
Cheers,
Socorro
Source: Leme, E.M.C. 2003. Nominal extintion
and the taxonomist's responsibility: the example of
Bromeliaceae in Brazil. Taxon 52(2): 299‑302.
_________________________________
M. Socorro Gonzalez
Elizondo
Herbario CIIDIR
Instituto Politecnico Nacional
Sigma 119 Fracc. 20 de Noviembre II
Durango, Dgo., 34220 MEXICO
Tels. (618) 814 4540, (618) 814 6802; (55) 5
729 6000 ext. 82609
________________________________
De: Mary Barkworth
<Mary.Barkworth at usu.edu>
Para: Stephen
Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>;
"taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu"
<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>; Michael A. Ivie
<mivie at montana.edu>
Enviado: Jueves,
8 de febrero, 2018 19:32:47
Asunto: Re:
[Taxacom] Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?
But lumping (wide scoped supraspecific taxa)
can also result in loss of understanding. There are no magic
answers. Your wide scoping is my lumping and potential death
by nomenclature - failure to identify the subsumed taxa into
subsequent studies and/or failure to include them because
they are not distinct.
Mary
-----Original Message-----
From: Taxacom
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of
Stephen Thorpe
Sent:
Friday, February 9, 2018 4:22 AM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu; Michael A. Ivie
<mivie at montana.edu>
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Elimination of
paraphyly: sensible or not?
At any rate, the basic problem
appears to be that "understanding" is always
inconclusive and in flux (and may not even be able to be
defined very precisely if you mean some sort of collective
understanding by the entire scientific community). So, the
question is how much inconclusivity and/or flux do we want
in taxonomic classification? My preference is to try to
minimise it. I would go for more wide scoped supraspecific
taxa (genera, families, etc.) There is nothing worse than
oversplitting of genera, etc. This just leads to more
instability as a result of phylogenetic studies.
Stephen
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 9/2/18, Michael A.
Ivie <mivie at montana.edu> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Taxacom]
Elimination of paraphyly: sensible or not?
To: "Stephen Thorpe"
<stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>,
taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Received: Friday, 9 February, 2018, 2:09 PM
OK, I
misunderstood you, but you
misunderstood me as well. "... in the
face of ever advancing understanding of the evolution of
life on earth"
is
not
meant to be just
phylogenetics, but all aspects of biology that is bring
more and more sense to the universe every day (expect in
understanding voting patterns or political
motivations).
Mike
On 2/8/2018 6:02 PM,
Stephen
Thorpe wrote:
> Mike said: "...
in
the face of ever
advancing understanding of the evolution of life on
earth"
>
> It is a moot point
whether
cladistics/phylogenetics does in fact advance
understanding of the evolution of life on earth! It seems
to me to be little more than a paint by numbers approach
which can in theory be replicated by anyone else who uses
the same character weightings, etc., but replicability
alone does not imply that we are actually advancing
understanding of the evolution of life on earth"!
>
> You also misunderstood my comments about
retaining birds and mammals as named taxa. They ARE
monophyletic, and I didn't say to necessarily retain
them as taxa of equal rank to reptiles (so subtaxa of
reptiles are indeed fine to me also), I just meant that we
don't want to simply dump them into reptiles such that
Reptilia simply contains various subtaxa from each in a
way that doesn't group bird (or mammal) subtaxa
together under a name.
>
>
I'm surprised that anyone
finds "interesting"
the inconclusive and ephemeral results of
phylogenetic studies!
>
>
Stephen
>
>
--------------------------------------------
> On Fri, 9/2/18, Michael
A. Ivie <mivie at montana.edu>
wrote:
>
> Subject:
Re: [Taxacom] Elimination of
paraphyly: sensible or not?
> To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Received: Friday, 9
February, 2018,
12:56 PM
>
> Hi
Stephan,
>
>
It
seems to me that you
have this premise
>
backwards. Rather than there
> being a
> cabal
of rabid cladists obsessed with eliminating
paraphyly, > I > think there is a cabal
of rabid > revanchists obsessed with hanging on
to > familiar paraphyletic taxa in the face of
ever >
advancing
understanding
> of
the
evolution of
> life on earth.
In
actual practice, most
advocates
> of a
monophyly standard continue to
use and
> propose
taxa that cannot be
> shown to be
>
monophyletic, but if we have evidence, why not
use it?
>
> You say
"We wish to
> retain birds and
also mammals as useful
monophyletic
>
taxa, for obvious
reasons." How, if you > mean as >
nomenclaturally-recognized taxa at > a level
equal to reptiles, is this > obvious, > or
to be wished for? We have the words "birds"
> and
"mammals"
> for the folk
> taxonomy, but why not
recognize them for what they really > > are?
Subtaxa of Reptiles works fine for > me.
>
> As for why look for
> monophyletic
lineages? Because
scientifically,
> doing phylogenetics
is INTERESTING. I myself
> do mostly
alpha taxonomy,
> because I
> don't have the
skill set to be a
leading
> phylogeneticist, but
> I find their
results
> to be very
thought provoking,
interesting and even
> exciting. It
is not that they get too much
>
funding, it is that
> faunistics and
taxonomy
> get to little.
>
>
Mike
>
>
>
>
On
> 2/8/2018 3:07
PM, Stephen Thorpe
wrote:
> >
>
Hi
all,
> > I have
been giving some
thought
> to the cladistic
obsession
of eliminating
paraphyly in
>
taxonomic classification. For
many taxa (above species), the > subtaxa consist
of one or more clearly monophyletic groups, >
plus a possibly paraphyletic residue (i.e. no apomorphies
to > bind the residue together into a
monophylum). So, if we must > eliminate paraphyly (or
possible paraphyly), the only > options are to
either: (1) subsume the monophyletic subtaxa >
into the paraphyletic residue; or (2) break up the
> paraphyletic residue into monophyletic subtaxa.
Effectively > the two options may actually be
equivalent. An example might > help to illustrate
my point. Let's take a simplistic > view of
reptiles as scaly tetrapods, birds as feathery >
winged bipeds derived from
reptiles, and mammals as hairy > tetrapods
derived from reptiles. So, amniotes (reptiles, >
birds and mammals) are a monophyletic group, as are birds
> and also mammals, but not reptiles (reptiles
being the > "paraphyletic residue"). We
wish to retain birds > and also mammals as
useful monophyletic taxa, for obvious > reasons.
So, what to do? Luckily, within reptiles there are
> some monophyletic subgroups of sufficient
diversity to be > useful, but this might not have
been the case if all > reptiles were just
basically "skinks", with only > species
or perhaps also generic differences between them.
> Had this been so,
amniotes would have to be taxonomically > split
between numerous (maybe hundreds) virtually identical
> taxa of "skinks", plus birds and also
mammals as > just two taxa at the same level (not
necessarily a ranked > level, but direct child taxa
of amniotes). Would this be a > useful
classification of amniotes? I suggest that it would
> be far more useful to recognise a single
paraphyletic taxon > of reptiles (all the
"skinks" in the hypothetical > example),
plus birds and also mammals (i.e. just 3 direct >
child taxa of amniotes). I wonder for plants, fungi and
also > invertebrates, if there might be many taxa
analogous to the > above hypothetical example,
with a paraphyletic residue > consisting of
hundreds of "skinks", but also with >
just one or two very distinct and diverse monophyletic
> subtaxa? If so, would it be sensible to eliminate
paraphyly > or best just to live with a known
paraphyletic residue as a > unified subtaxon? Given
the amount of limited resources > which are
being allocated to projects to eliminate >
paraphyly, to the detriment of alpha taxonomy, it would
be > nice to think that there was a clearly good
reason for the > elimination of paraphyly, but
I'm not so sure that there > is! The usual
argument seems to be that you cannot make >
meaningful predictions from paraphyletic taxa, but how
much > biology does rely on the making of
predictions based on > taxon membership, and what
proportion of those predictions > end up being true
anyway? For example, you might predict > that a
newly discovered braconid is a parasitoid, but a few
> braconids are phytophagous anyway. So, I guess
that the main > question that I am posing is
whether we think that the > benefits of monophyly
justify the spending of so much > limited
resources on the elimination of paraphyly? Perhaps
> the elimination of paraphyly is being driven
instead by > economic factors, doing phylogenies
being a more cost > efficient way for institutional
scientists to spend their > time on than alpha
taxonomy?
> >
> Stephen
> >
>
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__________________________________________________
Michael A.
Ivie, Ph.D.,
F.R.E.S.
NOTE: two
addresses with different Zip
Codes depending on carriers
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Collection
Marsh Labs, Room
50
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173145
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Lincoln Street
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mivie at montana.edu
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