The PhyloCode: The logical outcome of millennia of evolution of biological nomenclature?

Abstract

Biological nomenclature harks back to a remote prehistoric past, as shown by the universality of fairly sophisticated folk taxonomies and nomenclatures found on all inhabited continents. Ethnobiologists have suggested that these nomenclatures include cryptic ‘ethnotaxonomic ranks’, although the existence of these ranks has been increasingly questioned recently. The fact that no trace of such ranks has been evoked in Aristotle's classification of animals but that they have been described in antique Roman ethnotaxonomies casts further doubts about these cryptic ranks. The advent of rank‐based nomenclature (RN) in the mid‐18th century has had a pervasive, but not only positive, influence on biological nomenclature. The use of a single type and of a subjective, artificial nomenclatural rank does not delimit taxa under RN. This is even a goal of RN, according to Principle 2 of the Zoological Code. This contrasts with the nomenclatures of other fields, some of which are designed to delimit entities fairly precisely (e.g. geopolitics, stratigraphy, chemistry), and in which ranks are either defined more objectively (e.g. geopolitics, chemistry), or used informally and relegated to a secondary role (e.g. biogeography, paleobiogeography), or vary in time (e.g., paleobiogeography) or space (e.g., stratigraphy). A trend towards more explicit and precise delimitation of entities over time is also discernible in some fields, especially geopolitics and stratigraphy. In this context, the development of phylogenetic nomenclature (PN) and the recent advent of the PhyloCode appear as the logical outcome of the development of evolutionary biology and phylogenetics.