WW wrote:
"If you read the toxinological literature, you would think that no taxonomy on venomous snakes has been done since the 1960s."

That is true only if they are written by pharmacologists, who often do not keep themselves informed of the latest taxonomic proposals. The same is true of many other biologists who do not specialize in some aspects of natural history. Many embryologists, for example, continue to use the name "Amblystoma punctatum" (Ambystoma maculatum) decades after it has become obsolete. In a paper written by Fry et al., one of the junior authors is a taxonomist even though the senior author is a pharmacologist. The nomenclature used in this paper is pretty current, albeit not widely accepted. For example, this paper used the name "Coelognathus radiatus" even though many, if not most, people still refer to this species as Elaphe radiata. In general, I find that cladistic or Hennigian taxonomists generally accept most taxonomic proposals by other cladists. The Darwinians tend to ignore most of the cladistic taxonomic proposals, and the herpetoculturists and most papers written by grad students simply follow the latest proposals regardless of merit (or lack thereof).

Taxonomy is not science. There is room for disagreement with a particular taxonomic arrangement even though there is little or even no disagreement with the scientific data on which the taxonomic arrangement is based. For example, looking at the tree of Moriarty and Cannatella (in press), Hyla regilla and Hyla cadaverina both are outside of the group of species traditionally referred to as Pseudacris. Therefore these two species of Hyla can be retained in Hyla, contra Moriarty and Cannatella's preferred taxonomic arrangement which put both of these inside Psuedacris.

A Darwinian and a cladist will classify organisms differently even though both of them are looking at the same tree. A Darwinian will accept paraphyletic taxa if they are morphologically homogeneous in order to promote taxonomic stability. A cladist will disqualify paraphyletic taxa because of his/her ideology and replace them with numerous contrived higher taxa that cannot be distinguished from each other morphologically. For example, because the genus Elaphe is paraphyletic, a cladist who is intolerant of paraphyly has transferred members of Elaphe to about a dozen contrived genera (such as Euprepiophis, Pantherophis, and Pseudelaphe) which are morphologically indistinguishable from one another and from Elaphe.

Such taxonomic proposals do not do any good because they make biological communication and information retrieval (the main reasons why humans classify organisms) more difficult and at the same time they obscure evolutionary relationships. Under the traditional arrangement, we can be reasonably sure that Elaphe obsoleta and Elaphe flavirufa are closely related to each other and to Elaphe scalaris. We have no such assurance with the new taxonomic arrangement. We do not know if "Pseudelaphe flavirufa" is really more closely related to Coluber or Drymarchon or whether "Pantherophis obsoletus" is really more closely related to Ptyas or to Masticophis than it is to Elaphe.

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