David et al.,

It's possible the persistence of "tradition" here is rooted more in human
psychology that resistance to "rational innovation." The human mind has
evolved to efficiently classified the elements of experience. Our minds
did not evolve to do "Science," with a capital S. The Linnean system is a
systematization of the contemporary European vernacular classifications &
nomenclatures and shares basic features with folk systems of most if not
all cultures and languages, including binomial names and a hierarchy of
ranks. You can program your computers to operate according to different
principles, but I suspect you will find it exceedingly difficult to
program the human mind to operate in ways foreign to its nature.

Gene Hunn.

On Fri, 2 Feb 1996, David Wright wrote:

> Oops. My previous message on this topic went out inadvertantly before
> I had a chance to proofread it (someone walked into the office; I
> intended to postpone the message, but hit the wrong key on autopilot
> and mailed it instead). I hope the numerous typos and glitches are
> obvious as such.
>
> The last part of that message was about how a system of naming taxa
> without assigning them to ranked categories (family, genus, species, etc)
> would do away with the host of problems associated with our antiquated
> (literally pre-evolutionary) Linnaean system. Binomials are only part of
> the problem; the myriad comparative analyses published each year at the
> "generic" "familial," etc. "levels" -- when such "levels" do not exist --
> are another part; splitting and lumping of taxa are yet another artifact
> of having categories; and there's even more. But don't hold your breath.
> Moving to a saner system has been proposed, but people scream bloody murder
> about breaking with tradition (kind of like DOS living on). Looks like
> we'll be using 18th century classification and its attendant foibles well
> into the new millenium. It's important to maintain a sense of humor.
>
> David Wright
> dwright at u.washington.edu
>