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(This page is really a dictionary entry. The word is much used on Wikipedia and probably not know by many readers, so i think we need this. Feel free to improve the definition, and/or come up with a systemetic way to distinguish dictionary entries.) |
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(This page is really a dictionary entry. The word is much used on Wikipedia and probably not known by many readers, so I think we need this. Feel free to improve the definition, and/or come up with a systematic way to distinguish dictionary entries.) |
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In biological taxonomy, a grouping of organisms is said to be paraphyletic if they do not represent all the descendents of a common ancestor species. Groupings of this kind are greatly disturbing to those who advocate cladistics, movement that strives to base all taxonomies strictly on the basis of ancestry. |
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Many of the older taxonomies contained paraphyletic groupings. The Linnaean taxonomy is especially notorious for this. This does not necessarily mean that older biologists meant to create paraphyletic groupings. More often it was just that they needed to have a taxonomy in order to organise the huge number of species in a way they could understand, and without modern scientific evidence, guesswork was required that later turned out to be wrong. |
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In biological taxonomy, a grouping of organisms is said to be paraphyletic if they do not represent all the descendents of some common ancestor. Most schools of taxonomy advocate that groups reflect phylogeny instead, and so view the existence of paraphyletic groups in a classification as errors. |
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No doubt some of the currently fashionable taxonomies (as of 2001) will later turn out to be paraphyletic, though hopefully as more evidence accumulates a system will develop that is satisfactory to cladists in the long term. |
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Many of the older classifications contain paraphyletic groups, especially the traditional 2-5 kingdom systems and the classic division of the vertebrate?s. This does not necessarily mean that older biologists meant to create them; more often it was just that they needed to have some taxonomy in order to organise the huge number of species in a way they could understand, and without modern scientific evidence, guesswork was required that later turned out to be wrong. No doubt some of the currently fashionable taxonomies (as of 2001) will later turn out to contain paraphyletic groups, though hopefully as more evidence accumulates a system will develop that is satisfactory in the long term. |
In biological taxonomy, a grouping of organisms is said to be paraphyletic if they do not represent all the descendents of some common ancestor. Most schools of taxonomy advocate that groups reflect phylogeny instead, and so view the existence of paraphyletic groups in a classification as errors.
Many of the older classifications contain paraphyletic groups, especially the traditional 2-5 kingdom systems and the classic division of the vertebrate?s. This does not necessarily mean that older biologists meant to create them; more often it was just that they needed to have some taxonomy in order to organise the huge number of species in a way they could understand, and without modern scientific evidence, guesswork was required that later turned out to be wrong.
No doubt some of the currently fashionable taxonomies (as of 2001) will later turn out to contain paraphyletic groups, though hopefully as more evidence accumulates a system will develop that is satisfactory in the long term.
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