Re: The Papers That Ate Cincinnati

[John Conway <john.a.conway@gmail.com>]

T. Michael Keesey wrote:

> Which ones? I welcome correction from a native speaker, but I think
> none of the common words for "bird" in the extant Romance languages
> are cognate with Latin "avis". Examples:
> - French: oiseau
> - Italian: uccello
> - Portuguese: pÃssaro
> - Romanian: pasÄre
> - Spanish: pÃjaro

Got me there. David Marjanovic said it was the case some of the threads, 
and I assumed he was right (he knows a lot more about it me!).

> No, that's an apomorphy-based clade. 

No, I disagree. A change of behaviour (such as deciding to flap, jumping 
out of a tree, running up a log, whatever) may or may not go with a 
corresponding apomorphy.

> It's equivalent to _Avialae_
> sensu Gauthier and de Queiroz, 2001. And even if the exact content is
> difficult to determine, it's still potentially useful, being a real
> entity relevant to discussions of the origin of flight.

It's not just a difficulty with content, it's extraordinarily difficult 
(I would argue nigh on impossible) to determine which apomorphy is the 
right one for predicting powered flight. Form and function are not so 
closely tied as all that, and the functional morphology is complex and 
contentious. In either case, the concepts are clearly distinct.

> The idea of not defining the name "Aves" at all was discussed here:
> http://www.phylonames.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19&start=59