>>Yes, I for one agree. Despite the now widespread view that the viridis complex should be submerged into Morelia following Kluge's analysis, for the most part I still hold that this view is little more than uninformed, slavish idolatory. I have yet to be convinced that the distinct morphological radiation of a group of species that are each other's closest relatives - ie the genus Chondropython - should be synonymised with another morphologically distinct radiation of species - ie the genus Morelia....

You have to understand the fact that although Kluge used similarities in morphological characters to group species and to elucidate relationships among the species he studied, he did not base his classification of these same species on the morphological differences or similarities between them. What Kluge and other cladists are trying to figure out first and foremost is a tree, or a branching diagram of genealogical relationships. After the tree is obtained, it is then decided how best to classify organisms based on the arrangement of that tree, using the guiding principle of the cladists, which they call the principle of monophyly. WW explains how it works on his web site the last time I visited. Briefly stated, cladists like Kluge and others do not want to split the tree in such a way that a taxon will consist of anything other than a single ancestor and all of its descendants. No matter how morphologically different one of the descendants of this common ancestor is, it must remain within the taxon if removing it results in a paraphyletic parental group. The alternative is to recognize a distinctive descendant as a distinct taxon and then split the remainder of the parental group into as many groups as necessary to make sure that each and every one of these groups consist of a single ancestor and all of its descendants.

Any group that is missing even one of the descendants of the common ancestor is termed "paraphyletic" and paraphyletic taxa are not recognized by cladists. Thus the principle of monophyly has often resulted in either excessive lumping or excessive splitting. In my experience, Kluge tends to be a lumper, so he lumped Morelia and Chondropython in the same genus. Other taxnomists, using the same principle as Kluge, may have a tendency to split. The splitters therefore would probably have split Morelia into several different genera, each of which may differ little from one another. A good example of excessive splitting would be Utiger's split of Elaphe into many morphologically indistinguishable genera formerly placed in Elaphe.

>>Oh, and by the way, I still believe that Morelia carinata should not be placed within Chondropython just because of a few characters that may also be reasonably considered merely convergent with the viridis complex....

Perhaps a good way to determine that question would be the use of molecular data. Often morphological features are subject to convergence, far more so than molecular characters in general, although there are exceptions to that general rule. Until molecular data is available, any attempt to reclassify the pythons on the basis of morphology would probably only be a short term solution that is bound to be overturned by future molecular studies.

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