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Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2001 10:14:30 -0600 (CST)
From: znc14@TTACS.TTU.EDU
To: david baum <dbaum@oeb.harvard.edu>
Cc: PhyloCode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu
Subject: Re: apomorphy-based names
On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, david baum wrote: > David may be right that for internal political reasons we cannot yet ban > apomorphy-based definitions. But I hope that one day the vertebrate > paeontological types, and whoever else is inclined towards apomorphy-based > definitions, can be convinced to make-do with stem-based and node-based > definitions. Without wishing to seem insulted, I feel I shold interject. I understand the frustration that Dr. Baum seems to feel regarding the differing approaches to nomenclature necessitated by our respective disciplines (see Dr. De Quieroz's points). I certainly don't want to imply that I think Dr. Baum is being deliberately coarse, sometimes I too feel his frustration too. However, I feel I must defend the practitioners of PT in vertbrate paleontology. Although, As Dr. De Quieroz has pointed out, VP workers may be more inclined toward apomoprhy-baed definitions, I do not feel that we project a *need* for them. They effectively do not exist in the current practice of dinosaurian phylogenetic nomenclature... we all took Baum 1995 to heart. In recent papers on the phylognetic taxonomy of mammals and non-crown birds (within dinosaur stuidies), I have seen a similar paucity of apomorphy-based definitions, although I do not know this literature as well. Many VP non-practitioners of Phylogenetic Nomenclature advocate character-based definitions of typological taxa, and often this can become conflated with PN, as some non-practitioners apparenly do not "get" the difference between an essentialist, character-based definition and a phylogenetic, apomoprhy-based definition. This tends to come up in the (now pro forma) "critique" (read demonstrations of one's lack of understanding) of phylogenetic nomenclature. However, this does not mean that VP, as a whole, embraces apomorphy-based definitions. :) Jonathan R. Wagner