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linean taxonomy vs cladestics
Topic Started: Jun 15 2018, 12:33 PM (614 Views)
flashman63
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Cladistics are useful in mapping evolutionary paths and relationships, Linnaean taxonomy in sorting animals for other purposes as it's more intuitive. I prefer cladistics, but I don't despise Linnaen taxonomy as much as me people here seem to.
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I don't really think it's despicable at all really. You are very right about intuitive, for general purposes I actually think it's quite useful. But when you're creating a project based on evolutionary change, it doesn't make much sense to use.
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I never saw how Linnaean is somehow more intuitive. It just adds an extra thing to remember, what rank everything is.
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I agree. From a perspective originating in math, a cladistics is simpler than a ranked cladistics. Adding ranks doesn't tell you anything new about the life in question.
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Ranks are good to classify animals in casual reference, like to say dogs are a species of the Canis genus in the Canid family, rather than saying that dogs are a type of Canis which are a type of Canid.

Ranks are arbitrary and are useful for our purposes but cannot be used taxonomically to anything but an arbitrary degree. Every individual animal in a species is unique to some extent and so the only way ranks could really work was if we called every single animal its own species - an impossible feat. We can only categorize broad groups of a given type of organism which are mostly similar and which mostly breed together as a species, and this works most of the time. Eventually populations evolve to the point they don't readily breed together and we call them a new species. But there is no point from A to B where you can draw that line. Tigers and lions today don't coexist with their common ancestor and so we can easily say they are two species. But what if tigers lived in India, Lions lived in Africa, and in between there was a cline of big cats varying from mostly lion to mostly tiger? You couldn't easily divide that population. There are living animals like this today and it makes the whole linnaean thing really difficult to work with.

There are also animals which look different enough, don't meet much in the wild and so are supposedly different species - but which breed together freely when they do meet without any fertility loss, like polar and grizzly bears. When we categorized those two species, they never seemed to mate in the wild. Now as the arctic warms, they come into contact and breed together. If we just landed on Earth today and discovered these two bears and saw how they interact, we'd consider them one varied species.

Linnean taxonomy also features such things as fish and reptile, which refer to animals of a general type but not necessarily any close relation. It's alright to call a crocodile and a lizard reptiles in general conversation because they are similarly adapted. But taxonomically, a crocodile is of course closer to a bird. While I feel all of the levels of this method of classification can be used to refer to clades, it requires some be changed so that birds are reptiles, and technically all land animals are fish. And even then, they will always be arbitrary. We can fit general groups of life into tiers - a family, comprising genera, comprising species - but exactly where one genus turns to another is ultimately what the person decides. Life is a continuum, not a series of distinct steps where an animal suddenly becomes something new in one generation. We want to fit life into neat little boxes, but that isn't how life is meant to be.
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The one nice thing with Linnaean is the more uniform suffixes that come with the ranks, whereas cladistics gets you the mess of arbitrary, poorly-thought out names clades like Mammalia have become full with.
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LittleBirthdayGirl!
Jun 18 2018, 11:16 PM
The one nice thing with Linnaean is the more uniform suffixes that come with the ranks, whereas cladistics gets you the mess of arbitrary, poorly-thought out names clades like Mammalia have become full with.
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Jun 18 2018, 11:37 PM
LittleBirthdayGirl!
Jun 18 2018, 11:16 PM
The one nice thing with Linnaean is the more uniform suffixes that come with the ranks, whereas cladistics gets you the mess of arbitrary, poorly-thought out names clades like Mammalia have become full with.
What do you mean by that?
Consider the following: Theriformes, Holotheria, Trechnotheria, Cladotheria, and Zatheria.
All are clades that are basically marsupials and placentals and the next closest relation. Most notable things you get before reaching the split from monotremes at Theriiformes are the dryolestoids and the allotheres.
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Oh, that doesn't bother me, those are important. I was referring to shit like Euarchonta (a dumb replacement of Archonta), Cetartiodactyla (a dumb replacement of Artiodactyla), the horrible Cetancodontamorpha/Whippomorpha mess (the former is the larger group that includes the latter, the crown, unfortunately not called Cetancodonta), and all the various and increasingly dumb names for competing hypotheses. Like, we've got Scrotifera, naming a bunch of laurasiatheres after having scrotums (yep...), perhaps containing Ferungulata, one of multiple terrible "just smash two names together" names (see also Euarchontaglires), or contrarily containing Zooamata, which literally means "animal friends".

All of names are various levels of dumb etymologically and none fit together in any nice sort of way. Pterosauria has a similar problem. In one glaring example, for one theory of pterosaur classification, someone coined "Neopterodactyloidea" for a group of derived azdarchoids (which contains a Tapejaromorpha and Dsungaripteromorpha), the latter group itself part of Ornithocheiroidea, Pterodactyloidea, and Novialoidea, in successive order... and that last one doesn't even have a root taxon! It can seem dumb naming a family and order for every species of bird, even the monotypic ones, but it really does go a long way in having good and understandable structure (bird clade names are usually decent, with some big misses now and then - how about Otididae within Otidae?).
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Sheather
Jun 18 2018, 11:01 PM


But what if tigers lived in India, Lions lived in Africa, and in between there was a cline of big cats varying from mostly lion to mostly tiger? You couldn't easily divide that population. There are living animals like this today and it makes the whole linnaean thing really difficult to work with.

There are also animals which look different enough, don't meet much in the wild and so are supposedly different species - but which breed together freely when they do meet without any fertility loss, like polar and grizzly bears. When we categorized those two species, they never seemed to mate in the wild. Now as the arctic warms, they come into contact and breed together. If we just landed on Earth today and discovered these two bears and saw how they interact, we'd consider them one varied species.

that is why I Said genius is more stable than species, though not sure right now
but basically the definition of species is not a sharp like as some may think, i mean nothing in nature is purely sharp0 lines
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Linnaean classification really doesn’t have uniform suffixes. The only rank that has a required format is the family rank, and even that differs in different groups. For example, in animals it ends in -idae and in plants it ends in -aceae. While it’s true that some groups, like birds, have orders that all end in the same suffix, that doesn’t have to be the case, just look at mammalian and retilian orders.

The Linnaean classification system is still useful when only extant or modern biological systems are being discussed, for example in conservation. But if you are looking at anything from an evolutionary biology perspective, Linnaean classification just isn’t useful. There’s no point to assigning ranks when there is a nearly unlimited number of theoretically possible clades in existence. However, the idea of a species can still be useful because it is the smallest useful group in evolutionary biology. And we have to categorize life into some sort of system to be able to study it at all. Species are just the best way to do that, at least for now. And I seriously doubt we’ll ever abandon the concept of species, because that would just be a huge problem converting everything we know into whatever new system someone could come up with.
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Linnaean classification really doesn’t have uniform suffixes. The only rank that has a required format is the family rank, and even that differs in different groups. For example, in animals it ends in -idae and in plants it ends in -aceae. While it’s true that some groups, like birds, have orders that all end in the same suffix, that doesn’t have to be the case, just look at mammalian and retilian orders.
Of course, but even the enforcement of -ini, -inae, -idea, -oidea goes a long way in making things easy to understand. You see a name, you have a rough idea how big of a concept it is. Compared to stacking the same suffix like in my pterosaur example, or including completely unrelated names in the middle of it all, like Pachyrostra or Eucentrosaura in Ceratopsidae.
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LittleLazyLass
Jun 19 2018, 12:27 AM
Oh, that doesn't bother me, those are important. I was referring to shit like Euarchonta (a dumb replacement of Archonta), Cetartiodactyla (a dumb replacement of Artiodactyla), the horrible Cetancodontamorpha/Whippomorpha mess (the former is the larger group that includes the latter, the crown, unfortunately not called Cetancodonta), and all the various and increasingly dumb names for competing hypotheses. Like, we've got Scrotifera, naming a bunch of laurasiatheres after having scrotums (yep...), perhaps containing Ferungulata, one of multiple terrible "just smash two names together" names (see also Euarchontaglires), or contrarily containing Zooamata, which literally means "animal friends".

All of names are various levels of dumb etymologically and none fit together in any nice sort of way. Pterosauria has a similar problem. In one glaring example, for one theory of pterosaur classification, someone coined "Neopterodactyloidea" for a group of derived azdarchoids (which contains a Tapejaromorpha and Dsungaripteromorpha), the latter group itself part of Ornithocheiroidea, Pterodactyloidea, and Novialoidea, in successive order... and that last one doesn't even have a root taxon! It can seem dumb naming a family and order for every species of bird, even the monotypic ones, but it really does go a long way in having good and understandable structure (bird clade names are usually decent, with some big misses now and then - how about Otididae within Otidae?).
I get where you are coming from with the mammals, but I don't get the issue with pterosaurs.


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Of course, but even the enforcement of -ini, -inae, -idea, -oidea goes a long way in making things easy to understand. You see a name, you have a rough idea how big of a concept it is. Compared to stacking the same suffix like in my pterosaur example, or including completely unrelated names in the middle of it all, like Pachyrostra or Eucentrosaura in Ceratopsidae.


Also, I don't see anyone complaining about the lack of uniformity of arachnid orders. They end in -gradi, -ones, -neae, -poda, and more.
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Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

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LittleLazyLass
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I get where you are coming from with the mammals, but I don't get the issue with pterosaurs.
Well, it's just confusing. Under a more linnaean-inspired scheme, an -oidea ending would indicate a superfamily, or an equivalent clade. If you see an -idae, it's gonna be within that, if you see -iformes it's probably higher and -morpha is higher than that. But once you start stacking that same suffix and putting them anywhere, that assumption works against you, and the suffix tells you nothing. Taking the Novialoidea example, you'd also expect there to be an associated "Novialus" or something within it, but there's not. Then you get completely random, hard to remember names like Breviquartossa, which leads into dumb etymologies like in the mammal example.

The lack of use of type genera for higher level names also hurts the system; again from the same Pterosauria classsification, we've got the group Ornithocheiroidea, and then Pteranodontoidea (even though this group still contains Ornithocheirus, so with traditional structure we'd stick with naming with it for simplicity), then Ornithocheiromorpha (inside two -oideas, and switching back on the nomical taxon, since Pteranodon is outside), then Lanceodontia (this isn't based on anything), then Anhangueria (switching taxa again, even though Ornithocheirus is in this one too), before finally switching back to Ornithocheirae. Although Linnaean doesn't govern past the family, the general practice of naming off a single root taxon would encourage something far more logical, like perhaps:

Ornithocheirae - Ornithocheiromorpha - Ornithocheiriformes - Ornithocheiria - Ornithocheiroidea - Euornithocheira

This naming scheme for the six clades above makes it really easy to look at this and say, oh, this is Ornithocheirus' branch on the tree; whereas when I see Pteranodontoidea within Ornithocheiroidea, I'm inclined to think the former doesn't include Ornithocheirus... but it does.
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LittleLazyLass
Jun 19 2018, 07:44 PM
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I get where you are coming from with the mammals, but I don't get the issue with pterosaurs.
Well, it's just confusing. Under a more linnaean-inspired scheme, an -oidea ending would indicate a superfamily, or an equivalent clade. If you see an -idae, it's gonna be within that, if you see -iformes it's probably higher and -morpha is higher than that. But once you start stacking that same suffix and putting them anywhere, that assumption works against you, and the suffix tells you nothing. Taking the Novialoidea example, you'd also expect there to be an associated "Novialus" or something within it, but there's not. Then you get completely random, hard to remember names like Breviquartossa, which leads into dumb etymologies like in the mammal example.

The lack of use of type genera for higher level names also hurts the system; again from the same Pterosauria classsification, we've got the group Ornithocheiroidea, and then Pteranodontoidea (even though this group still contains Ornithocheirus, so with traditional structure we'd stick with naming with it for simplicity), then Ornithocheiromorpha (inside two -oideas, and switching back on the nomical taxon, since Pteranodon is outside), then Lanceodontia (this isn't based on anything), then Anhangueria (switching taxa again, even though Ornithocheirus is in this one too), before finally switching back to Ornithocheirae. Although Linnaean doesn't govern past the family, the general practice of naming off a single root taxon would encourage something far more logical, like perhaps:

Ornithocheirae - Ornithocheiromorpha - Ornithocheiriformes - Ornithocheiria - Ornithocheiroidea - Euornithocheira

This naming scheme for the six clades above makes it really easy to look at this and say, oh, this is Ornithocheirus' branch on the tree; whereas when I see Pteranodontoidea within Ornithocheiroidea, I'm inclined to think the former doesn't include Ornithocheirus... but it does.
So, what you're saying is the lack of consistency for suffixes and prefixes? I get it now, but it still seems that many groups like arachnids have no internal consistency but aren't causing any problems.
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Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates
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ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess)

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Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized.
Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal.
Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents.

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Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups


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