Principios de Taxonomia

7.12 The Phylocode j215
Figure 7.13 Example for the phylocode nomenclature: The name of the Sauropsida (reptiles
including birds) would be Includes turtles, excludes mammals.
biodiversity is divided into ranks and that, accordingly, something similar to families
and orders occurs in nature. Furthermore, the impression is conveyed that these
rankings are comparable to each other, whereas a mammalian family is actually not at
all comparable to a nematode (roundworm) family. The second advantage of the
phylocode system lies in the long-term stability of the assigned names. The names do
not have to be changed constantly when new insights regarding phylogenetic
relationships are obtained.
The disadvantage of the phylocode system lies in its unwieldy nomenclature.
The names assigned by the phylocode system are long and cumbersome. Taxon A
displayed in Figure 7.12 has the name Includes c, excludes d. The group of
Sauropsida (reptiles including birds) would have to receive the name Includes
turtles, excludes mammals (Figure 7.13). Of course, such names would not be
appropriate for everyday use. Possibly, many of the old Linnaean names will have to
be retained and in a parallel nomenclature assigned to particular clades after the
phylogenetic definition has been published.
The phylocode is the first system that consistently applies Darwin s theory of
descent and implements it in the nomenclature. Additionally, it is the first system that
attempts to overcome the incompatibility of the Linnaean system with Darwinism by
completely abandoning the formation of classes.
The theoretical foundations of the phylocode system date back to the 1980s.
An initial workshop meeting of the pioneers for the phylocode took place in 2002 at
Yale University in New Haven, USA Here, a resolution was passed to define clade
names according to the rules of the phylocode, which would then be regarded as the
starting point for the specification of priorities. The first international meeting took
place in 2004 at the Museum National d Histoire Naturelle in Paris and consisted of
contributions from taxonomists from eleven countries. The International Society