Burn?

[jlipps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jere H. Lipps)]

This is late because of the PaleoNet shutdown, but I'll send it anyway even
though Stefan B. and others have nicely addressed some of these points.

A number of items are being mixed here.

Somehow the Codes are being equated with Linnean nomenclature.  The Codes
do not specify that we must use any particular system.  It provides a set
of rules which we should follow in naming taxa.  The ICZN tells us the
rules to name taxa up to the Family level, but there is no specification
that anyone need use that category.  It does specify that species must
consist of a generic and specific name, and provides rules for shifting
species to other genera, etc.  The Code does not advocate any system,
whether it be evolutionarily based in a traditional sense or cladistic or
arbitrary.  It simply gives the rules without which chaos would reign.  I
see it much like traffic rules--these rules don't tell you where to go or
how to go, simply how to do it in an orderly manner that makes it possible
for everyone to get where they are going in whatever kind of vehicle.

If we went to a completely phylogenetic scheme with names for clades, we
would still need a set of rules to govern which name should be used in
order to avoid chaos for all the same reasons we do now.  Book burning is
not what any of us want to do, I suspect.  We might want to modify some of
the rules, but if we do that, then lots of valuable information could be
lost.

We all want to know what the relationships of our organisms are and to
communicate about them.  Cladistics provides an explicit, reproducible,
testable hypothesis based on a set of characters some investigator selects.
A different judgment might produce a different cladogram.  All of which is
ok.  But we communicate in words mostly, and either we name these
hypotheses, or we carry diagrams or lots of paper and pencils around with
us when we talk about our science.  Since evolutionary entities vary in
many morphologic characters, the idea of a holotype will continue to be
useful as a central, defining,  starting point when discussing these
entities, whatever you call them.  Even if we used a strictly statistical
numbering system, which would be hard to talk about, it will require rules.

A problem is that many systematists seem to think that names, ranks,  and
their implications are static.  Certainly the more traditional approach and
some subsequent uses encourages that, but all systematic proposals and most
uses of them from Linneaus to today are hypotheses to be further tested
with the most modern data, methods, and philosophies.  If all proposals are
considered hypotheses, rather than the true word, a lot of egos would be
preserved and our science could advance faster. Everything is always
changing and cladistic analyses are not likely to change that mode.  If
geology and paleontology teaches us anything, it is that change is the
constant condition, and so it is with evolutionary and systematic
hypotheses.

Another place we have gone wrong is to equate ranks across groups or even
within groups.  I know that the families of foraminifera that Sepkoski
included in his various analyses are not the same thing as the families of
mollusks.  I know that Loeblich and Tappan's families are not the same as
Cushman's.  Nevertheless, valuable information is conveyed about
evolutionary hypotheses when someone mentions these things to me.  All of
us, including strident cladists, work this way.  Everyone knows what birs
are, and some of us know that they are a clade of some kind along with
dinosaurs.  For almost all of us, that is sufficient.  If we need more, we
go to the library and see what the latest or any other word is.

None of this is new.  Debates about systematics have gone on constantly.
The best way to deal with all of this is to do good work.  The debaters
will beat a path to your doorstep, although if you work on forams rather
than dinosaurs, it may be a tiny path.





Jere H. Lipps
Professor, Department of Integrative Biology
Director, Museum of Paleontology
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
510-642-9006 fax 642-1822
jlipps@ucmp1.berkeley.edu