WOW, Bill, and here I was worrying about the proliferation of genera and
species....
Bill Purves wrote:
> Following up a bit on Ross's two good messages:
>> I'm underqualified to be guessing, but I'll guess anyhow and
> predict that agreement among most players will be reached,
> in a few years, on a proposition that divides the "protists"
> into several kingdoms, based on phylogenetic arguments.
>> At the recent International Botanical Congress, press releases
> were generated with a lot of new and quite old information.
> One piece that struck me was mention of three "plant kingdoms":
> "green plants," "brown plants," and "red plants." The greens
> would be the Chlorophyta-plus-land-plants. Fine. The browns would include
> the brown algae (Phaeophyta), diatoms, and golden algae, making an
> ugly kingdom in phylogenetic terms, since evidence indicates that the
> (kingdom?) Stramenopila is a monophyletic lineage that includes the
> Bacillariophyta (diatoms), Chrysophyta (golden algae), Phaeophyta,
> AND the Oomycota (water molds and powdery mildews). The
> red plants would be a clean, monophyletic kingdom consisting
> of the red algae (Rhodophyta).
>> For our plant-edly purposes, each of us simply needs to decide
> what works best in our own teaching. One can opt for something
> that tries very hard to represent true phylogeny (as far as
> the evidence currently goes), or for something that makes sense
> to an instructor in terms of ease or utility for the student,
> or for something that matches whatever textbook is being used
> (to minimize student confusion), or whatever. As far as I
> can tell, the organisms themselves don't care too much ;-)
> My own current preference is for a phylogenetic approach.
>> (bill)
>> William K. Purves Vice President/Editorial Director
> The Mona Group LLC West Coast Office
> 2817 N. Mountain Avenue phone: 909.626.4859
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> e-mail: purves at monagroup.com>http://www2.hmc.edu/bio/purves.html>http://www.monagroup.com> ________________________________________________________
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