Anyone familiar with evolutionary biology is bound to be familiar with phylogenies. I’ve even posted a few on here before. One thing which I’ve been tossing around is a means by which we can classify macroscopic organisms once we have a fairly solid foundation of the phylogenies of these organisms. Something which has always stood out, perhaps because I like numbers, is an alphanumeric classification system with clades being equivalent to various alphanumeric series. This would allow for specific identification of relatedness from a common organism (I’ll pick Agkistrodon contortrix for this demonstration). For example:
Let’s use “AAAAA” to be equivalent to the Agkistrodon genus, whereas “AAAAB” would be the Crotalus genus. The classifications would follow as such:
AAAAA111=Agkistrodon contortrix contortrix
AAAAA112=Agkistrodon controtrix pictigaster
AAAAA113=Agkistrodon contortrix laticinctus
AAAAA121=Agkistrodon piscivorous piscivorous
AAAAB111=Crotalus ruber (assuming, for the time, this is the closest related Crotalus species, which it may not be)
AAAAB112=Crotalus horridus (assuming this is more closely related to ruber than any others)
In other words, what this would do, is assign alphanumeric classifications to monophyletic groups allowing us to have more room to play with the names when two populations become isolated with distinctive variation between the two (subspecies) without losing specificity, and bein flexible enough so that the addition of another value does not influence the appearance of a clade. Elevating a genus clade to a family clade on the basis of variation and diversity does not affect the phylogenetic-based alphanumeric classification.
It’s all German to me Jared – looks like binary.
More like a base-100 filing system; 100^5=10,000,000,000 basal genus names (remember the Greek alphabet) possible, adding the two character numeric species suffix can give you up to species names, far surpassing the <100 million estimates by a factor of nearly 10,000. Names can be added later, instead this is a way to quickly catalog an organism based upon the specific lineage of that organism. For example, say a species is found which branched from the Agkistrodon lineage between A. piscivorous and A. bilineatus from the same common ancestor (a simulatenous three-way split), Instead of naming the organism and explaining to those in the field, the system I am imagining would enable the use of an AAAAA13x species as this imaginary group. I know there are flaws in this model, namely, that we would need as many categories as speciations which have surviving descendants and it is only useful for extant or recently extinct species, however, with recent advances in rapid genome sequencing and publication of sequences, comparisons between organism genomes will become much easier, enabling a system similar to this one.
“..species as this imaginary group.”
Wow! We’re ‘down to’ classifying imaginary animals now!
Just, “Wow!”
(signed) Homo lambsnavyrumus
Misquoting me doesn’t help…
So it’s like phyla,family,genus, etc… classification ???
(Now remember, be nice. I’m a dumb ass – oops I mean – Dumas)