Final post!!!

["Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>]

Jaime and others,
    Michael Benton certainly believes birds are descendants of dinosaurs 
(non-avian), as do I, but as we have discussed, this is not same thing as 
saying they ARE dinosaurs.
    The view that cladists are just "clarifying" what constitutes 
"Dinosauria" by including birds is not correct in a broader historical 
context.  Before the cladists came along, biologists strove to find 
monophyletic groups in the old sense of the word (holophyletic and 
paraphyletic).  What mattered was that a group have a common ancestor, and 
it was acceptable to create paraphyletic groups.
     Darwin not only said that natural groups should have a common 
ancestor, but in his own words (in eloquent 19th Century prose) said that if 
modification in sister lineages occurred at greatly different rates that the 
more modified lineage should be given a higher taxonomic rank.  Cladists 
flatly ignore this when they quote Darwin.
     Therefore to say that these 19th Century naturalists thought that 
Dinosauria had to include all of the descendants of the common ancestor is 
reading something into it that simply isn't there.
     Dinosauria and Aves were classified separately for well over a 
century, even by those who thought birds were probably dinosaur descendants. 
 Even Michael Benton in his recent Vertebrate Paleontology book classifies 
them in separate taxa, although he did put a cross-referencing marker 
(functionally similar to those I use) to show that birds are descendants of 
dinosaurs.
                --------Ken Kinman
P.S.  If you want, I can try to finds one of Darwin's two passages which 
shows that he believes when sister groups evolve at greatly differing rates 
that the faster evolving group should be ranked higher in the taxonomic 
hierarchy.        And I wasn't going to mention this, but your comments show 
that it needs to be brought up.  Cladists not only commandeered the taxon 
Dinosauria (however they might try to justify broadening its scope), but 
they also greatly changed the meaning of the term monophyletic, from 
"holophyletic or paraphyletic" to holophyletic only.  In fact it was this 
move that prompted Peter Ashlock to proposed the term holophyletic in order 
to clarify the situation.  But the cladists would have none of it, no matter 
how much confusion resulted.  The ends supposedly would justify the means, 
but unfortunately 30 years later it still hasn't ended the way they thought 
it would.  We are still no closer to the stability they thought would result 
from cladistic classification methods, and in some ways it has made matters 
worse.  Predictions that cladistic stability is just around the corner just 
don't wash any more.
     I have no more time for trying to explain all this.  I'm tired of 
spinning my wheels and have other things to do, so this will be the last 
time I spend this much effort on such threads within this newsgroup.  There 
are obviously great philosophical differences between cladists and 
eclecticists, and if I haven't made any headway here to convince you that 
middle ground approaches are possible (and preferable) then I guess I'm 
wasting your time as well as mine.
                      -------Ken Kinman
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