Re: Mr. Magorium's New Papers Emporium

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> Any idea what Dr Lockley's been smokin', and where we can get some?

Schindewolf's (1950) typostrophe theory: typogenesis (childhood), typostasis 
(maturity), typolysis (old age & decay), extinction (death), rinse, repeat. 
An English translation of his book was published recently because the idea 
is of considerable historical interest.

I think the whole idea comes from the unconscious assumption that Linnaean 
ranks are real -- so that a taxon is real because it has a rank, even if 
it's paraphyletic.

Note how Lockley's abstract begins with an assertion that ought to be a 
conclusion, but apparently is not.

If anyone happens to have a pdf of this thoroughly inaccessible-looking 
publication, I'd appreciate and read it, but it's certainly not something 
I'll bother hunting down on my own.

---------------------

Regarding the "holism vs reductionism" allusion, however, I think that 
Lockley's idea is actually very reductionistic: it says that everything we 
see in the biosphere is just more of the same few processes that we already 
know at the cell level. This is not among its problems.