Andy_Jewell

Dancer, Developer, Doer and Dreamer. Philologist and Philogynist.

ajewell at cinci dot rr dot com, if you need me

Hi Andy -

All the AtlasShrugged pages will be redirected to Atlas Shrugged soon, so there is no reason to edit them.

Hi! It's nice to see someone else interested in biology here. I'm the WikiPedian who created the sort-of-rambling group pages that were already here. Since you're organizing a little differently, and probably better, than I was, I had a few questions/comments.

Prokaryotae - you say that this is a new form of Monera but I don't think that a majority has made the switch. There doesn't seem to be any reason to, and historically such names have tended to be ignored, at least (Protoctista, Chlorophycophyta, etc). A lot of workers tend to neglect the name altogether, since it seems to be polyphyletic. Any reason for choosing this form?

Protista - the classification of protista has been changing a lot recently, and I think most people have more or less abandoned higher level Linnaean stuff for the time being. Euglenids have variously been grouped as a phylum or class and referred to as the Euglenida, Euglenophyta, Euglenophyceae, etc. Some of the groups you mention have been dropped entirely, especially the amoeboid ones, due to heavy polyphyly, and I'd been leaving those off and grouping by rough grades (flagellates, amoeboids, algae, etc). I would love to hear if you have any good ideas on what to do, since the flat list seems wrong and what I was doing seems clunky.

Misc terms - aren't phyla of plants normally referred to as divisions? Also, Hominidae has been used in two senses recently: as the family containing Homo and as the lone family of Hominoidae (humans and apes). The former is what Linnaeus did, but he himself said he wished he'd done the latter and there's been some effort to change.

Once again, thanks for showing up and helping with what's probably one of the worst sections of wikipedia. :)

Josh Grosse