Wulf wrote:
"Well, I'm not a professional nor am I a calist."

Me:
Not sure what a "calist" is. Perhaps it is an arrow aimed at my direction? Am I a "victim" of Wulf's "anger?"

Wulf:
"I didn't yet read enough about cladistic to know for sure why they perhaps do not accept paraphyletic taxa, but like many other ideologies it is a matter of personal taste what you decide to choose as practical methods for analysis."

Me:
The cladists' dislike of paraphyletic taxa is not a method for phylogenetic analysis. Their disqualification of paraphyletic taxa is method for classification. The cladists' dislike of paraphyly is indeed a matter of personal taste because it is not based on anything that science has discovered about evolutionary process. In fact, the cladists' disqualification of paraphyletic taxa from classifications is contradictory to what we know about evolution. Budding evolution, in which a species (or higher taxon) continues to exist while a new species (or new higher taxon) evolves, is according to scientific research the most frequent way species or higher taxa originate. Even the cladists admit that. As R. L. Carroll pointed out, paraphyletic groups are the inevitable result of the process of evolution. Therefore it is, as Mayr and Ashlock pointed out, scientifically untenable to disqualify paraphyletic groups. Biologists are classifying biological organisms, which in turn are the products of billions of years of evolution. Throughout these billions of years, new organisms have most often evolved while their ancestors continue to persist. Paraphyletic groups therefore are very common. Therefore the cladists' decision to disqualify paraphyletic groups really makes no sense scientifically. Further, their disqualification of paraphyletic taxa, as I painstakingly pointed out with real world examples, result in either excessive splitting (in which closely related lineages are placed in different taxa that are morphologically indistinguishable from one another) or excessive lumping (in which heterogeneous taxa are lumped indiscriminantly in the same taxon). Kluge's lumping of Morelia and Chondropython is an exammple of excessive lumping that WW supports. Utiger et al.'s splintering of Elaphe is a good example of excessive splitting, since none of the genera they recognize can be distinguished from each other. Even WW cannot tell us the difference between, say, Pantherophis and Elaphe.

Even though the disqualification of paraphyletic taxa is scientifically untenable, even though it results in both excessive splitting and excessive lumping, and even though it results in taxonomic chaos, the cladists continue to treat paraphyletic groups as something unnatural, when in fact paraphyletic groups are the natural products of evolution.

Wulf:
Well, if one would fly alone, nobody else would accept any proposals so why do the work then?

Me:
Good scientists, like eagles, fly alone. But that does not mean that good scientists disagree. In fact, when two scientists who think independently but they converge on the same conclusion (as did Darwin and Wallace on evolution), that can only mean that it is more likely to be the correct answer than if one scientist simply blindly accepts the conclusion of another. No matter how many cladists blindly follow Hennig's principle of holophyly, it does not make Hennig's (and his followers') disqualification of paraphyletic taxa any more scientifically tenable.

As Galileo also pointed out, "It is true that because eagles are rare birds they are little seen and less heard, while birds that fly like starlings fill the sky with shrieks and cries, and wherever they settle befoul the earth beneath them..."

Much of the taxonomic literature of the past 20 years have been befouled by cladists who attempt to disqualify paraphyletic taxa by blindly applying Hennig's principle of holophyly.

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