In article ,
Jeff Layman wrote:
On 13/01/2014 16:01, David Hill wrote:
Interesting article about the above.
http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/4616/

Nothing particularly unusual - it's going on all over the plant taxonomy
world.

For example, in Australia, it is proposed that "Acacia" will become
"Racosperma", and "Dryandra" will disappear - they will now be "Banksia".

That's the way the botanical fanatics get their rocks off :-(

It's not the considered reclassification that I object to, but the
arrogant and unscientific way in which they gratuitously rename
plants based on very partial genetic data, usually to change to a
new one (sometimes the old one!) a short while later. There are
also far too many papers that publish classifications based on a
single characteristic, which is well-known to be statistically bogus.

About 40 years ago I remember reading a controversial article (possible
from the American journal "Science"), which, IIRC, basically argued that
flora were unsuited to the sort of taxonomical classification which
worked well for fauna.

Definitely. That is well-understood by the few sane people. Even
for the fauna, it fails a fair proportion of the time.

Regards,
Nick Maclaren.