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Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 11:39:16 -0700
From: [unknown]
To: "'phylocode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu'" <phylocode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.=
Subject: RE: crown clade convention
Thanks for this Kevin (and Phil). Your well-argued posts have confirm= ed my thinking. A couple of final thoughts. > In short, the crown convention asks paleontologists to make a > sacrifice to achieve greater consistency between how both paleontol= ogists > and neontologists use widely known names. Paleontologists are bein= g asked > to give up some of their logical and established traditions for the > greater good of all biology. The important point here is that ther= e is no > question that Jason is correct in arguing that using Tetrapoda for = an > apomorphy clade and Neotetrapoda for the crown is logically consist= ent and > in agreement with the way that paleontologists have traditionally u= sed > these names. The argument against this position is that it would b= e > better for biology as a whole to adopt conventions 1) that maximize > consistency in the use of names among all biologists and 2) that us= e the > best known names for the clades about which biologists as a whole h= ave the > most to say. The fact that Neotetrapoda hasn't been used isn't in my mind really s= trong evidence since Gauthier, Kluge and Rowe formally ignored it in Phylog= enetic Nomenclature a mere 8 years after Gaffney suggested it, opting for th= e crown convention because of problems seen with apomorphy-based definitions = (as argued by you and Jacques in 1990) that have subsequently been either corrected or shown false. Neotetrapoda has never received the weight = of authority that either the 1988 paper or the publication of the compan= ion volume would lend (which I see as a great opportunity to educate nonsystematists as to the importance in precision of name use). Still= , I see your point. What is "best for biology" is for everybody to mean the same thing wh= en we use a name, thus either the crown or apomorphy definition is suboptim= al. In the former case, there will be confusion engendered when "tetrapods" = are no longer "Tetrapods", which will not only be among paleontologists but = also the educated general public who read Jenny Clack's or Carl Zimmer's r= ecent books, and among neontologists who still consider tetrapods to be lim= bed vertebrates even if some of their papers are less than precise. In th= e latter case, the confusion will continue to be as Michel and Kevin ha= ve characterized it, with inaccurate statements entering the literature = (which I still think is a by product of an overly pedantic, literal reading = of this literature). So the real question in my mind is how one determines wh= ich confusion is potentially greater, and I'm not so sure how that is don= e objectively. At this stage preference for either option seems to be b= ased on opinion. Regarding your number 2, respectfully, there has been an awful lot of= ink spilled over the clade of limbed vertebrates over the past ten years, including in the neontological literature. Obviously biologists have = a lot to say about this group (which they call "Tetrapoda"). Jason