In article ,
Stewart Robert Hinsley writes:
|
| There is a pragmatic rule for species as well, if you're talking about
| conservation of widely used names over earlier published names. For
| example Adansonia gregori (the Australian baobab) is conserved over
| Adansonia gibbosa, and Luehea speciosa over Luehea alternifolia.

When was that introduced? And is it sufficiently flexible to cancel
that damn-fool V. farreri and similar namings?

[ Beyond this point, I apologise to anyone who has trouble botanical
jargon; skip the posting. ]

| One other cause of name changes is embracing of the principle of
| monophyly by taxonomists, combined with new data from DNA sequencing.

Er, yes, but the very concepts of that are likely to be confusing to
someone who had trouble with Latin names! Also, there is a serious
flaw with the basic concept of monophyly, because we know that it
isn't even remotely true at the specific level and it is unclear how
reliable it is even for 'wild' taxa at the generic level. It's OK
for vertebrates, but a poor model for anything else. It doesn't
really become reliable for the higher plants until more like the
tribe level (depending on family, of course).

I know that I have asked before, but I am still interested in any
papers that do any reasonably sound analysis of a fairly wide area;
I have no interest in a new classification of Arabis with especial
reference to geographical variation, for example. If you bump across
one, please tell me.

But ANY paper that PROPOSES a classification on the basis of a
selected subset of characteristics without describing the effect on
the other known ones is irretrievably wrong-headed, as we all knew
40 years ago! And most of the ones that I found were like that :-(


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.