Ouch! I got censored unless I screwed up my submission several days ago. Anyway, I will try again and tiptoe around sensitive issues. If I did overstep my bounds I apologize.

Cking wrote:

"According to Frost and Hillis, there are many differences between Simpson's ESC and Frost and Hillis' "ESC." Frost and Hillis wrote:

"Although the views of Simpson and Wiley could be construed as identical, as evidenced by their species definitions, in fact their concepts are considerably different. Simpson believed that the recognition of polytypic species followed logically from his definition; Wiley did not. Simpson did not believe that statements about species were logically reducible to statements about the recovered historical relationships of the constituent populations of polytypic species; Wiley did. That is, Wiley would apply his evolutionary species concept only in ways that are consistent with recovered historical relationships; Simpson would not. Simpson believed that his lineage concept, because of its continuity, required that arbitrary “chronospecies” be recognized; Wiley did not, arguing instead, like Hennig (1966), that species are delimited from speciation to speciation. At least for biparentals, one is hard pressed to find any difference of substance in terms of application between Simpson’s (1961) concept of species and the biological species concept of Mayr (1942, 1969)."

Me: Congratulations! You passed the test. Glad to see that you do read some of this stuff. But why would you if you don't have to? Man it can be boring.

Cking wrote:
"Therefore your claim has been directly contradicted by Frost and Hillis. As I said, Frost and Hillis' "ESC" is not the same as Simpson's "ESC" and I also said that those who claim they are the same are promulgating snake oil. "

Me: My claim was purposely made. I wanted to see what you knew.

Cking wrote:
"Even a little knowledge can be "dangerous" to the snake oil salesman. The cladists are preying upon the ignorance of most biologists, who are not "...steeped in the arcane theories and esoteric practices of systematic biology," as J. D. Lazell (1992 Herpetol. Rev.) so nicely put it. By redefining old familiar concepts (such as monophyletic) and giving them new meanings, the cladists are attempting to fool most biologists into believing that the cladists are disqualifying polyphyletic groups when they claim that the groups they are disqualifying are not "monophyletic." In reality, many of the groups the cladists disqualify from classification are in fact monophyletic sensu Darwin, Simpson, Mayr, and Haeckel, but are paraphyletic sensu Hennig and his followers. If the cladists want to continue wreaking havoc with biological classification, they better come up with a scientifically tenable explanation for their actions. "

Me: I have to respond to this by asking a larger question, how does science progress, meaning when do we think we know we know something? By constant subjection to peer review and refutation. Have 99% of the practicing systematicists and phylogeneticists (and other comparative biologists) been misled? Might have All of these extremely bright independent thinkers been following a pied piper? The answer is safely no. It makes no sense to trust science to provide new knowledge in say physics, or physiology, but not evolutionary biology. The process is the same regardless of the discipline. As such, it is really a shame that views like yours (phylogeneticists are snake oil salesman) are out there.

Cking wrote:
"BIC professes to be a knowledgeable person, and I am sure he is. If so, perhaps BIC can inform those who are less knowledgeable as to why paraphyletic taxa, which is of course the "inevitable result of the process of evolution" (according to R.L. Carroll) should be disqualified, since biological classification is supposed to conform to the set of historical facts known as evolution. How can one be conforming to the facts of evolution and yet at the same time not recognize groups that are the inevitable result of the process of evolution? How can one claim to understand evolution and yet classify organisms in a way that totally ignores evolution, as many cladists do without hesitation?"

Me: Thanks for the compliment. The other reply by Emoneill to your post will cover an aspect I can leave alone. Instead, I want to repsond by looking at paraphyletic groups in classification. Why all the hubbub anyway? If classifications are are information storage and retrieval systems, then we have to ask, what kind of information do we want to store and retrieve? Overall similarity? Amount of change? Phylogenetic relationships? It turned out that the most informative kind of information, and the easiest to store and retrieve, is the latter, the phylogenetic relationships. As such, only groups that contain all the descendants of a common ancestor are named. For example, if we want to retrieve the evolutionary relationships of reptiles, is it informative to exclude birds? I would argue no because then we lose information about the evolutionary history of that group. If we did exclude birds, we would be embracing a paraphyletic group, which is not natural in the sense that the evolutionary history is not correct, it is missing a piece of the history. Would it make sense to describe the history of the United States but leave out the Louisiana Purchase? No.

I hope some of what I wrote is useful to some readers of this forum.

Cheers,
BIC

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