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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 12:53:35 -0400
From: "Moore, Gerry" <gerrymoore@bbg.org>
To: 'Kevin de Queiroz' <Dequeiroz.Kevin@NMNH.SI.EDU>
Cc: PhyloCode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu, cantino@ohiou.edu
Subject: RE: Re: RE: RE: Nathan Wilson's question
No I wasn't offended (it takes a lot more than that). Upon re-reading the message, I can see how one might come to such a conclusion. All I was trying to do was stress the potential for dual interpretations (be they right, wrong, correct, incorrect, real, imagined or otherwise) regarding the problem at hand. Kind of funny that the message I wrote -- expressing concern about the potential for more than one interpretation regarding certain phylogenetic definitions -- had more than one interpretation itself. One of the reasons that I like the PhyloCode listserv is that the posts stay on message (i.e., PhyloCode stuff with minimal venting). I apologize for briefly getting us off message. I think all those involved in this discussion would agree that some may have difficulty applying a clade name, given the current wording of the PhyloCode and presented with a situation where a species of hybrid origin is used as specifier. I would say that that agreement represents progress. The trick now is to deal with this problem. My current feeling is that the PhyloCode should go with Kevin's interpretation (made explicit in a relevant Article with accompanying examples), limit the conservation approach to those cases where circumscriptional instability is a problem (this can occur when the name was used as a specifier prior to knowledge that it was of hybrid origin) or the application is ambiguous (I believe this can occur when more than one of the specifiers used in a definition is of hybrid origin). I am working through several examples now for a later post. As Kevin pointed out in his earlier post, the fundamental problem here is not that a species can be a member of two nonnested clades. And this is what can cause the problems. Cheers, Gerry