© 2008 Society of Systematic Biologists
Application of Phylogenetically Defined Names Does Not Require That Every Specifier Be Present on a Tree
Edited by Michael Lee
1 Department of Environmental and Plant Biology, Ohio University Athens, Ohio 45701, USA; E-mail: cantino@ohio.edu
2 Department of Biology, P.O. Box 355325, University of Washington Seattle, Washington 98195-5325, USA; E-mail: olmstead@u.washington.edu
Received January 15, 2007; Revised May 1, 2007; Accepted October 24, 2007
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In a recent paper in this journal, Bertrand and Härlin (2006; henceforth B&H) argued that there is a trade-off between stability and "universality" in the application of taxon names in the phylogenetic system of nomenclature (PSN) that was originally developed by de Queiroz and Gauthier (1990, 1992) and is incorporated in the PhyloCode (Cantino and de Queiroz, 2007). By "stability," they meant stability of taxon content (i.e., clade composition), and by "universality," they meant applicability of a name in the context of "a wide range of phylogenetic analyses and trees" (p. 848. The term "universality" more commonly refers to the meaning of a name rather than the context in which it can be applied; e.g., de Queiroz and Gauthier, 1992, and references cited therein.) Specifically, B&H maintained that increasing the number of specifiers in a phylogenetic definition beyond the minimal two, which is often