Joe wrote some time ago:

>**tiresome advocacy on**
>You might think that one could quickly judge the support for the Phylocode
>by looking at what percentage of classifications in the literature use it,
>but this is harder than you might think -- as not that many classifications
>are being published.  These days not that many phylogenetic systematists make
>classifications.  They infer phylogenies, and base interesting biological
>conclusions on them, without the intermediate step of reducing them to
>classifications.  How one does the classification matters less and less to
>drawing conclusions from phylogenies.  The whole subject of classification
>(at least, above the species level) is widely hailed as Central To
>Systematics,
>praised in presidential addresses and meeting banquet speeches, taught as
>basic in courses, held out to philosophers and historians as The Main Issue,
>but then increasingly ignored in practice.`
>**tiresome advocacy off**

My take, as an outsider to the art and practice of phylogenetics, is not so
much that people are reluctant to name the intermediate nodes as it is that
they don't trust them all that much.

There is a certain abritrariness to the production of nodes and branches, as
the title of the song that David Hillis' group sang at the last Evolution
meetings suggests, "I've got to find a shorter tree." The "interesting
biological conclusions" that Joe speaks of tend to be rather robust, regardless
of what technique or data you use. All of the trees have a pronounced tendency
to point the same way, thereby strongly implying that you're seeing at least
some version of reality, but the trees themselves seem to have a fragile
uncertainty about them, making the naming of the intermediate  nodes a little
tenuous, if not futile.

Wirt Atmar
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