In article , Tim Tyler wrote:
Kay wrote or quoted:

Aha! Things have moved on a bit. My reference (Flowering plants of the
World, ed Heywood, 1993) has Theaceae in a separate order Theales - it's
clearly been moved to Ericales

What is 'the taxonomy browser'? Who produces it?

It's the biggest dictionary of species I know of - see:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi

You should regard all of that stuff as dubious. There is some good
work being done, but the area is heavily polluted by dogmatists,
and most of the software used to produce the classifications is
crap. It is common for two classifications by 'respectable' people
to be wildly different and both "well supported".

As a statistician, that makes me certain that there is a methodological
failure in one or the other analysis - or, in this case, probably both.

This can be confirmed by the rarity of papers specifying precisely
the analyses their results are based on - in extreme cases, I have
contacted the authors of the programs used, who were themselves unaware
of what their own programs were doing! And those were the then leading
programs, trusted as wholly reliable by the field.



Regards,
Nick Maclaren.