Cladistic pedantry alert: I was under the impression that Fungi were actually a sister group to Metazoa/Animals (in contrast to birds, which are entirely within the Dinosaur clade).

Not to detract from your main point, of course – birds are dinosaurs, but they’re also really special dinosaurs, and it makes not sense to deprive them from their own category.

I get it, calm down – its all reptiles, all the way down…

as to liberals – as a comitted commie I have to agree, all liberals, conservatives, capitalists, jews, catholics, muslims, Daoists, nazis, trotzkists, stalinists etc. to the wall. No problemo.

Unfortunately my ESL skills are insufficient to understand what are you trying to say. Even after smoking some of Canada’s finest – WTF?

The T.REx was a damned reptile. Get over it. Most were reptiles. Of course there were some like triceratops that were more like cows than reptiles, but a good many were reptiles. No different than crocodiles or komodo dragons or any other such create that existed then and now. Dinosaus did not have feathers no matter what some egomaniac dickhead in a museum says. Velociraptor DID NOT have fucking feathers you morons! What is percieved to be feathers were flaps of dried skin that in commonplace in REPTILES when their flesh is deterorating! Any have drugged whoe on the street is smarter than some college professors and self proclaimed know-it-all experts. Gee wiz.

The feathers thing is just a pathetic useless brain dead attempt to try one more desperate time to get people to belive in the satanic inspired idea of evolution. Get over. people do not believe it. Now, get out of your mother’s basement, get a hobby, and stop whining about your precious flying lizards with chicken feathers and human dicks. The next thing we hea r will be self proclaimed experts telling us that dinosaurs were the first ones on the moon and that they found evidence that T.Rex had a natural rocket biult in his ass to lift him off the ground and once lifted off, he could use his featehrs to further his flight to the moon. We all know that’s where chese comes from. It is a scientific fact that dinosaurs ate cheese off the moon becuase darwein said so.

Get a life people and stop trying to screw up the world. If you want to help the world, ban liberalism.

Liberalism – a thorn in the ass of normal people since 1965. That should be the democrat theme for 2012.

I don’t have any problem with the idea that there is a clade of OWM which is the sister group of the clade of NWM + Apes. “Monkey” then, is a common language grade level term for OWM and NWM, and even, in some usages includes apes. When a child at the zoo exclaims about monkeys, it is OK with me so long as they are not antelopes or tigers. 🙂

This leads me to go to bed at night knowing that the “correct” definition of “fish” is does not include the fact that some of them lactate, and the “correct” definition of “hooved animal” does not have to include that some of them have fins and no legs.

Sometimes, the traditional classifications are in conflict with this cladistic classification. For instance, the traditional category of “deer and antelopes” if all inclusive of deer, antelopes, including pronghorns and cheverotains, includes whales.

If you want whales to be in a separate category from things with feet, then you need to break the larger clade into small categories, which means that “deer and antelope” has to disappear and can not be used as a category. That’s perfectly fine as far as the phylogenetics goes, but does not make sense in more practical and pragmatic ways.

That is not the point: It simply underscores the difficulty that can happen when a purely cladistic approach creates the categorical label.

The problem is not that (some) cladists tell us that we can NOT use a particular label … rather, it is when we are told that we MUST use a particular lablel . For instance, the terms “old world monkey, new world monkey, and ape” are no longer consdidered valid by cladists, because OWMs and Apes form a monophyletic group, but mokeys with apes excluded does not.

The solution to this, from a purely cladistic point of view, is to group OWMs and NWMs, which is not helpful because they are actually separately monophyletic and many of their common traits are probably convergences anyway; and to call apes monkeys, which is not helpful because all OWMs have the same exact set of traits that distinguishes them from apes on the basis of the same exact set of contrasts, and this set of differences includes a number of fundemental functional evolutionary differences. Being forced to fail to distinguish between a monkey and an ape is the same level of silliness as being forced fail to distinguish between a whale and a white tailed deer, or a kitten and a mushroom.

Greg, I have published taxonomic papers based on cladistic analysis. But clearly I still have a lot to learn, because I could not make sense out of what you had to say about cladistics.