Wulf wrote:

"Systematics are based on general conventions. Defying those would not be the right way. Would you drive your car over a red traffic light, just because you don't want to stick to some

conventions? If so, you will be a free thinking, but nevertheless dead eagle"



Me:

You misunderstand. It is not me who drove past a red light. It is the cladists who ignore scientific facts. They ignore, for example, the fact that evolutionary process results in paraphyletic groups. Therefore it is not scientifically tenable to disqualify paraphyletic groups from biological classifications. It is therefore the cladists who are ignoring the red lights. As Mayr and Ashlock pointed out, biologists have known since Darwin and Haeckel that Reptilia is paraphyletic sensu Hennig, but that has not resulted in a proposal to disqualify Reptilia as a taxon until cladistics became popular in the past 20 years or so. It is a cladist (J. Gauthier) who proposes to reclassify Reptilia so that it includes birds so as to eliminate paraphyly. Few scientists adhere to Gauthier's nonsensical reclassification of Reptilia, and even some cladists have said that they don't like Gauthier's definition. There is also some evidence that cladists are softening their hard line stance on the acceptance of paraphyletic taxa. Even such hard line cladists as Frost and Etheridge have accepted the family Agamidae, which is in their view paraphyletic. It seems that the softening stance on the cladists' irrational distaste for paraphyly have not reached the neck of woods in which some cladists reside. And these cladists continue to disqualify paraphyletic groups as though their research fund depend on their adherence to such irrational doctrines as the principle of holophyly. In all likelihood it does. So, don't take the stance some cladists take too seriously, they may only be doing it because of carrots and sticks, not because they really think that paraphyletic taxa are untenable.

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