Nick,
Your approach would break the taxonomic rule that a genus should be monophyletic, at least as we understand it at the time. Just lumping things together is not the answer.
Not following this would in my opinion lead to even more trouble. Its the simple adage "Do the best you can, with what you have to work with"; and that is what botanist have done over the years and continue to do today, some just do it better than others.
icones
----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 2:45 PM
Subject: [OGD] scientists doing taxonomy (was re;Sophronitis formerly Laelia)
I'm going to do my best to keep this thread going so that we don't revert to political/religious flamewars. wouldn't you all prefer an orchidaceous taxonomy flamewar?
Icones wrote:Unfortunately, in my opinion, this was a group of scientists doing taxonomy. Let me > explain.
DNA studies are not the 'end all be all' that the proponents try to make people
believe it to be. What I mean by that is that there are many decisions, judgment
calls, interpretations, criteria selection etc.. made by the people doing the study
before they get the DNA data that impacts the out come, plus the interpretation of
that data once they have them must be made sense of.
Given all that, wouldn't you agree that having large, broadly defined genera is safer than smaller genera? In the case at hand, if the data splitting the Mexican from the Brazilian laelias is robust, but the inter-relationships between the Brazilian species is more open to judgement calls, then lumping the Brazilians all into Sophronitis would help to create taxonomic stability. That way, when new data is generated which calls into question the relationship between, say, Sophronitis coccinea and Sophronitis purpurata, phylogenetic trees can be drawn and papers published without mucking around with the taxonomy. As van den Berg points out in his response, new data has already called into question the boundaries of the new Sophronitis and Hadrolaelia published by Chiron and Castro Neto.
Nick -- Nicholas Plummer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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