Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / December 2004

Um, it looks like I wrote unclearly.  Tudge was using it as an
example of why cladistics (phylogeny) should not be confused with
taxonomy (classification), not as a Shocking Revelation to Get People
to Buy His Book.

Basically, let me see.  I forget the details, but it amounted to
something like this.  Say we accept that, um, Chondrichthyes is
a class.  Then Osteichthyes is also a class, so Tetrapoda is at
most a subclass.  Now, this gets us Amniota as something like an
order, or something icky like a superorder or an infraclass if
you want to go that route.  In which case Synapsida is a suborder,
and Mammalia is something like a family.

I'm sure Tudge did it more precisely, but anyway, that's what I
remember.

No, an anti-one.  Benton was making the same exact point as Tudge,
but to judge by the length of the file, he was making it in
voluminous scarifying detail.  Basically, the *point* is that
taxonomy is for helping us talk about stuff by classifying it,
not for recapitulating its evolution; flipside, that taxonomy
is for the ignorant, as everyone is outside some limit, while
phylogeny is usually for the informed.  

Benton makes this point fairly concisely in the opening paragraphs
of his rant, probably more concisely than either Tudge or me.  But
he then has 20-odd pages more.  Since the point in question is
pretty obvious by itself, and is thoroughly driven home by any
good example such as the "mammals are a family" one (hey, did you
know that humans, chimps, and bonobos are all part of the same
subspecies?  I'm sure I can prove it with mindless cladistic
purity if I just try...) - well, I quake to think what sort of
belaboring and or hectoring the remaining 20-odd pages must've
been filled with.

Um, which paper?  I dunno.  I was digging around hoping that if I
tried enough palaeontology websites, *someone* would let me in on
the Grand Secret of what conditions were like in the European
Archipelago during the Maastrichtian.  (Something like, "And
England at that time was half-underwater, half-swamp" - or, for
that matter, "and England at that time was half-desert, half-
permafrost", though in that case I'd want a reference to the
palynology or palaeobotany! would be very helpful, for example,
compared to the *books* I've gone through and got nowhere with;
so no, I wasn't being hopelessly naive looking on the web.  Not
that this means I *found* anything useful.)  Anyway, there's a
palaeontology group at Bristol, and somewhere on their website
they offer various papers published and un, and I remember that
the anti-cladistics one was alone in a section of that page.

Joe Bernstein