Talk:Magnoliophyta

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Very interesting. I don't recall using this terminology much at all while getting my BS in Biology, and yet there it is. I still am having an internal debate on what we should use as the primary names of biology-related articles - should we stick to the most proper scientific names that only biology specialists use (exm: magnoliophyta)? Or should we use what most other scientists use (exm: angiosperms)? Or should we use what the general public is most familiar with (exm: flowering plants)?

In other articles that I have been working on we always strive to name those articles what most English speakers would recogize most easily. For example, I also contribute to many articles on historical figures and the wikipedians who are historians by trade refrain from giving articles overly pedantic names. They instead give them the name that they feel is the most recognizable by English speakers (Anton van Leeuwenhoek instead of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek -- even though most historians refer to him as Antoni in the most academic of journals).

I am torn: As a biologist, I feel that in the case of biology articles, it just doesn't seem right to use the most common name in many circumstances (except with the common names of widely known particular species). However, as a wikipedian and human being who wants to democratize science, it doesn't seem right to use the most academic and unapproachable names in most cases either.

Is there a middle ground??? Could we have an article on Flowering plants that concentrated on a lay/horticulturist interpretation and have that linked to one on Magnoliophyta that concentrated on evolution, physiology and cladistics? Would that work? I have already spoken to another wikipedian with a biology background about a similar topic at User talk:Rgamble. Do you have any ideas on this?

PS No matter which way we go, we should always provide redirects. --maveric149

This came up when the biology pages were first being created, and I don't think we were able to come up with any definite concensus. But consistency is nice to have, and there are lots of taxa that don't have any common names at all. Sometimes you can anglicize (Hymenoptera -> Hymenopterans) but that's pretty cheap and doesn't always work (Tetraodontiformes). If memory serves the higher level taxa all use the biological names because I started them off with the Protista and didn't want to change part way.

--Josh Grosse

ITIS divides this class into 7 subclasses: Asteridae (12 orders), Caryophillidae (3 orders), Dilleniidae (15 orders), Hamamelidae (7 orders), Hamamelididae (4 orders), Magnoliidae (8 orders) and Rosidae (18 orders). It is hoped that this can be reconciled with the patchwork below. This writer acknowledges his role in the confusion. The data below is gradualy being transferred to the article an the class, and erased from here as this happens.

We could follow ITIS, but there is a strong concensus that many of those groups are artificial and are being maintained mainly for legacy. For instance, the orders here labelled basal flowers would be placed under Magnoliopsida - and indeed, that is critical for the group being named such - but it really does appear that they are no more closely related to the other dicots than they are to monocots. And again, the Dilleniidae appear to have been an invention of Cronquist that are abandoned by most later schemes. The writer of the above has blamed the original author, who would be me, for muddying the waters, but the waters are already muddy and I think it would be a bad idea to create artificial simplicity by following an obsolete scheme. As such, I strongly oppose bringing the classification followed (Judd, as one of the most notable alternatives to Cronquist and one that seems best in line with current thought on true relationships) in line with the ITIS.

First, let it be said that I had no intention to attach blame to anybody in my comments; that would serve no useful purpose. That being said, I must comment on these matters as a non-biologist who is only slightly better informed than the average non-biologist. As the person who raised the ITIS issue in the first place some comments are in order.
  1. The general public These people know next to nothing about biology, and even less about Latin. Their limited knowledge is based on a series of common names whose precision is sometimes seriously lacking. When they ask questions, they want clear and unambiguous answers with no grey areas whatsoever. This parallels what those involved in Early Childhood Education see in the development of 4-year olds.
  2. The specialist (In this context the botanist) Living and breathing a specialty has been known to warp one's vision of the world. Cladistics versus traditional taxonomy can easily become a mojor controversy in the specialist's quest to have THE right system. He doesn't want to hear about the public's discovery of a reflected eyelash in the microscope.
  3. Redirects Maverick149 is right above. Redirects are always available.
  4. Latin names These are essential for precision in whatever taxonomic system we choose, nevertheless, much of the textual material can still go in an article under the common name. It is easy to place cross references between the two. Even I will not redirect walking the dog to walking Canis domesticus.
  5. Cladistics I'm no creationist, but I don't need everything answered, and every living thing set in its proper place on the tree to convince me of that. Evolution does not depend on humans knowing the details of how it happened. To the public the difference in the shape of two leaves makes more sense than the DNA differences of the same two plants. They can see the leaves, but none of them have a home laboratory capable of studying plant genomes. The cladistic approach may very well be "more correct", but are we striving for purity or communication?
  6. ITIS I make no apology for having pushed its application, whatever its deficiencies, and my own immediate plans are to carry through with it until I have arranged all the Magnoliopsida families. I agree that it is not a perfect system, and that it may even be obsolete, but it does provide a structure within the realm of understanding. The number of incertae sedis in the alternative suggested that it was perhaps not the best choice at this time. I certainly welcome additions to explain in each taxon, just how the systems differ in that context, and links and redirects are always available.

--Eclecticology, Friday, May 31, 2002

Two notes, Eclecticology. First, the idea that the classification of organisms should reflect their evolutionary relationships is not specific to cladistics. It is a good bet that when Cronquist worked out the system used on ITIS, he did so in the expectation that the groups were at least likely to be monophyletic. Many are not, and I get the strong impression that most botanists consider the system at least in need of considerable modification. Second, it is absolutely true that no new system as comprehensive has arisen to replace the old, and you may want to keep the old on those grounds. But the presence of incertae sedis is not a bad thing - if we truly don't know the relationships of those plants, we shouldn't make them up.

So, yeah, if you want to apply ITIS, I'm not going to stop you. But I don't see what exactly it is you're trying to communicate with it. Information on individual species and groups can be placed on their respective pages. The classification itself is not of any real interest when it is only one of several variants in use, except perhaps for historical reasons that do not warrant the central attention given to it. And information on the relationships between different flowers is simply not present in that scheme. The last are what interests me, and I would be surprised if I were entirely alone in that.

As for purity, why shouldn't we go for it? Simple listing of information is done quite well on normal webpages, or for that matter in normal books. What makes wikipedia special is its ability to stay up to date and reflect current thinking. Cronquist is mainly around as a taxonomic legacy, used all over the place because it's not easy to change and not quite clear what to change to. But we can change easily and don't have to adhere to any particular system. I followed Judd because his work seems to reflect current thought, but in the event that they disagree I would hope we depart from him, and in the worst case list everything as incertae sedis. Because, speaking as a reader, that tells me something, and it is in the hopes of getting that kind of information that I would look at wikipedia rather than some other source.

Make any changes you want, but please do me the favor of considering this before you do, ok? Thanks, Josh Grosse

Rest assured that I will take your comments into consideration. Even if I base my efforts in relation to ITIS, it's with the understanding that that too must remain flexible. As I see it, their approach is also a blend of traditional and cladistic approaches. For example, their adoption of the Ciconiiformes as an order of birds that brings together several seemingly very different former orders has not exactly pleased the traditionalists. Even cladists seem to have their internal differences. In their own way some exhibit a zeal rivalled only by that of some creationists, while others would be quite happy to find some degree of reconciliation with traditionalists.
I do believe that in using a system like ITIS, I must strive for some level of consistency in how I do so. If I don't, I at least have a responsibility of suggesting why I chose to abandon it in particular circumstances. The strangest results will no doubt appear in taxa whose names appear in both systems. ITIS (by my count) shows the family Rubiaceae to include 79 genera; the Wikipedia article now lists about a mind-boggling 600 genera, all properly wikified to non-existent articles. It is more a personal time allocation decision on my part to work only down to the order level for now, but I could certainly see the need for effort in looking at some families.
You, and at least one other Wikipedian, have made important comments which in effect caution against putting too much separation between the classification and the thing being classified. No single reply can adequately answer that. This is more a matter of attitude, and it requires attention every time a page is substantively altered.:Finally the abandoment by some cladists of the traditional Linnaean ranks does not make things any easier for people to understand for readers whose background is often based on texts that long pre-date Cronquist. They need to be guided from there to here, and doing that effectively requires addressing the issue from a position that they can grasp. Here at the Magnoliophyta article the traditional view that divides it into two classes is easy enough to explain by pointing to some clearly identifiable features of the plants. It is not enough for the cladist to simply say that this represents the latest in the understanding of plant evolution. There is still a long way to go from a broad theoretical statement about evolution to the very specific one that demonstrates how the various elements of this plant division fit that pattern. An article here that shows that could well be a template for the treatment of other taxa.


--Eclecticology, Sunday, June 2, 2002

Ok, let's see if we can't work something out that will cover all bases, by gradually adding more text and comments in place of the flat lists. On this, I have two preliminary suggestions, which I would want your OK for.

First, the division between dicots and monocots is prominent in all classification, but the terms Magnoliopsida and Liliopsida are only used by Cronquist and derivatives. As the informal terms dicotyledons and monocotyledons are here the far more stable, I think it would be better to list the corresponding articles under them, where they could consider differences between systems. That's a bit of an inconsistency but normally we go with the Latin names because they are more universal and less ambiguous, and here the opposite applies.

Second, you have been copying out the full hierarchy down to each group on its appropriate page. I have always thought that this was a bad idea, because it repeats information which might change, or might need commenting, all over the place. This especially applies here, even in the upper levels (Tracheobionta is far from universal, and would you add a domain or not?). A comment like Apiales is an order of dicot flowers, variously placed in the subclasses Rosidae and Asteridae should be sufficient to let people know where the order belongs, point them to where they should be able to find more information, and keeps the mess as localized as possible.

Sound good? -- User:Josh Grosse

Your approach sounds good.
I can live with Dicotyledon as easily as Magnoliopsida. I don't believe the former has yet been set up. Which form of the word, singular, plural or -eae? Redirects will be a big help here. This can allow the person who writes up a particular article to use either, while the reader can click on the link and end up at the same place.
Although I will probably continue to show a hierarchy, it may not be as full. The usefulness of this practice is to give a bird's eye view of where the taxon fall in the general scheme of things. A parallel might be that an article on the country Gabon could include an inset map of Africa to indicate where Gabon is. As to the trachaeobionta, I began by including it with links, and have sice stopped showing it as a link. I would certainly be open to stop using it entirely except when we are talking directly about subkingdoms. I had not considered including domains, but I can't say that it's a prospect that I approach with much enthusiasm. People have an intuitive concept about the words "plant" and "animal". These concepts may fray at the edges when we discuss more obscure life forms, but for the great bulk of knowledge that the average person encounters those are pretty good words - even when they sometimes need reminding that "animal" is not a synonym for "mammal". Generally in showing these hierarchies I've been tending toward linking only primary ranks, and have even started to avoid linking sub-classes. There could still be exceptions, especially when we are dealing with some of the really big taxa.
Comments of the type you suggest may be, along with redirects, the key to making this thing work. They can be a form of bio-NPOV. -- Eclecticology, Wednesday, June 5, 2002

As to the Rubiaceae, ITIS says that it is of unknown taxonomic completeness, and lists no other family in the order. So I used Delta, which has a lot more genera. I have yet to find a comprehensive list of all thirty-four gambiers, a number I found when I first wrote the article in Lojban. -phma

More recently many of the groupings have been questioned, and revised schemes, often quite different, have been proposed, largely based on ideas from cladistics (for a discussion of the difficulties see the copyrighted article Taxonomy, Classification, and the Debate about Cladistics at http://artemis.austinc.edu/acad/bio/gdiggs/taxonomy.html).

Saying that the newer classification systems are based on ideas from cladistics is strictly true but misleading. Some changes are mainly due to the idea that valid taxa must be clades, but others are removing groups now considered polyphyletic, which unlike paraphyletic groups are eschewed fairly generally. In short, many of them are shifts in our understanding of the organisms in question, whereas the above makes it seem like they are primarily shifts in classification methodology. Certainly cladistics had some role in those changes of understanding, but this is cladistics as a technique for systematics where it has reasonably wide acceptance, not as a dogma for classification where it is extremely controversial. So, for instance, you see some botanists argue that there is no reason to remove Magnolia and the like from the dicots (which are otherwise paraphyletic), but you do not see any arguing for the preservation of the Dileniidae (which are polyphyletic), except as a convenient system to use until a new concensus emerges. In short, I think this is oversimplifying to the point of being a false dichotomy, and am removing it accordingly. It doesn't help that the link seems dead.

I think it's time we reconsidered the classification we are using here. By now, the newer systems have become readily available, at least down to family level, and mostly consistent between sources. There are some slight variations and a few families that are left incertae sedis, but all in all these are signs that the taxonomy is a current concensus, as opposed to the work of an individual like the Cronquist system. And besides, what we have now is in many places an inelegant mess.

So, I have changed Rosales to give two lists of families, one typical of newer systems and one from the older. I would like to change all the order pages, most of which are at the moment nothing more than a list of families from one system or the other, to this same format. This would probably involve removing the children part of any taxoboxes, although the placement should be fine. After that the higher level taxa could be dealt with. Families are mostly constant between the two systems except for variations placement, which could be treated for the time being by saying "order: Rosales/Saxifragales" or something similar.

Please let me know what you think, and if you have any objections to this project.

Josh