Michael Hobbs writes:

> David - I agree with some of your points. Kingdom, Phylum, Class,
> Order, Family, Genus, and Species are unsatisfactory, as is
> demonstrated by the introduction of suborder, subfamily, etc. Loons
> and Grebes are in different orders, whereas all of the perching birds
> are in a single order. Are loons and grebes really more different from
> each other than swallows are from finches or ravens or shrikes? Are
> the ranks supposed to indicate the evolutionary time of splitting, or
> the genetic difference? They can't successfully convey both.

Well, I'm not a specialist in genetics, but it seems to me that most of
the work in phylogeny uses *precisely* the genetic difference to assess
the time of splitting between two "categories"...


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Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO!!!!
Serge Le Huitouze Intelligent Software Group
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