Re: Birds and pornography

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

philidor11@snet.net wrote:

<You're stuck with arguing about classification if you're looking at
Clades.>

  I thought that was all we were talking about here. Linnaean vs.
Phylogenentic Taxonomies. Evolution vs. (that other stuff) is entirely
different. Problem is, Linnaean is directly related and proportional to
(that other stuff) and there is no escaping its typological nature. As
long as you use markers of separation that _no one_ has ever been able to
define, then you're working in a frame of referrence no one can
understand. There is no framework until you can sit down and figure out
what the hell a Class is, or an Order, or whatever. This has led to Mayr's
little war against the new rank of Domain. He has no justification for
disallowing a new higher-than-thou rank because for some reason it
"belittles" the other ranks by making them less than what they once were,
so ancient and power and inclusive. Well, durnit, What the hell is a Class
and why does it get to be better than an Order? Carl von Linné may have
been smart, but his framework is typological and ultimately suits only
those who find it easier to "feel" their way through phylogeny instead of
those who chose to "think" through it by asking that most perilous of
evolutionary questions:

  What the Hell is a Class?

<You can now distinguish birds from dinosaurs from reptiles without 
agonizing over it.>

  Okay, everybody was asking about what to define Aves with. I'll counter
with: What apomorphy would you define Reptilia with? Now, think about this
one ... you must ask this question for every group of nature: apomorphy,
node, or stem, if you wanted to define the name in some way. If you don't,
then find out what the name means. There are plenty of reptiles that do
not crawl, so that saying "crawling things" won't work any more ... as
much as saying "flying feathered things" won't work for birds.

=====
Jaime A. Headden

  Little steps are often the hardest to take.  We are too used to making leaps 
in the face of adversity, that a simple skip is so hard to do.  We should all 
learn to walk soft, walk small, see the world around us rather than zoom by it.

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