Re: Greg Paul is right (again); or "Archie's not a birdy"

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

>  Provided a clean dichotomy. Our analyses by necessity treat "species"
>  as individuals with zero dimension in space and time. This assumption
>  is usually accurate enough (at least for nonmolecular datasets), but
>  there is no guarantee it is correct. And for paleontological
>  datasets, it is usually not even testable.
>
>  Besides, the neontological experience is that nodes as dichotomies
>  may be more fiction than fact - not always, but often (alternatively:
>  that nodes as dichotomies are arbitrary and evolutionary quite
>  meaningless entities).
>  http://www.genetics.org/content/178/1/427.full
>  http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/content/57/5/719.full It is unlikely
>  that this is a recent phenomenon.

But, you know, a million years or three of extinction make it look like 
a clean dichotomy in the vast majority of cases, and 100 Ma most 
definitely do.

Besides, the PhyloCode has two articles that deal with reticulation and 
hybridogenesis. They are problems for phylogenetics, but not for 
nomenclature (and they aren't intractable problems for phylogenetics 
either).

And finally, our knowledge of "species" of Mesozoic dinosaurs usually 
_is_ restricted to a single individual. :-)