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Journal of Paleontology

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SHOULD PALEONTOLOGISTS USE "PHYLOGENETIC" NOMENCLATURE?

¹ Division of Vertebrate Zoology (Ornithology), American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York 10024, gdyke@amnh.org (Present address: Department of Zoology, University College Dublin, Belfield Dublin 4, Ireland)

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

"What's the use of their having names", the Gnat said, "if they won't answer to them?". "No use to them" said Alice; "but its useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?" Alice Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll (1871).

Thanks to the Linnaean system of Biological Nomenclature systematics these days is an ordered discipline. Debates over specifics still abound, but there is little argument that taxonomy should reflect the current state of our phylogenetic knowledge. However, recent proposals to replace the historically developed and universally utilized Linnaean system of Biological Nomenclature with an alternative "phylogenetic" system of nomenclature (PN; formulated as the draft PhyloCode [http://www.ohiou.edu/phylocode]; e.g., Cantino and de Queiroz, 2000; see Nixon and Carpenter, 2000 for exhaustive citations) are flawed because they are founded on the misconception that Linnaean classification cannot (and therefore currently does not) accurately represent phylogeny. This is not the case—the ranked Linnaean system is a hierarchy, but then again, so is a cladogram and hence the former can mirror the latter. Although implementation of the proposed PhyloCode would result in huge implications within biological systematics in general (Nixon and Carpenter, 2000; Forey, 2001; Schuh, submitted), some workers (e.g., Brochu and Sumrall, 2001) have argued that proposals to implement this new system of "phylogenetic" nomenclature are a "good thing" for paleontology in particular. Since viewpoints contrary to the PhyloCode have already been aired elsewhere (e.g., Dominguez and Wheeler, 1997; Moore, 1998; Benton, 2000; Nixon and Carpenter, 2000; Forey, 2001), my aim here is to highlight a few areas of PN that make it an especially problematic proposal for paleontologists.

	WHAT IS THE PHYLOCODE?

 
The PhyloCode is a draft proposal to replace the current system of supposedly "non-phylogenetic" . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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