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Banning paraphylies and executing Linnaean taxonomy is discordant and reduces the evolutionary and semantic information content of biological nomenclature

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. For zoologists who find it problematic that botanists speak of “paraphyletic species”, we note that botanists have fundamental difficulties to say what a species is. The English speaking botanists do not have a special term for what by German botanists is called “Sippe” (=“clan”, “kin”). This usually describes a group of very closely related plant species (microspecies). Many botanists call such groups “species” whereas others say “taxon”.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Birgit Schlick Steiner and Florian Steiner, University of Innsbruck, Germany for constructive discussion and substantial improvement of the manuscript. All authors of this manuscript declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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Seifert, B., Buschinger, A., Aldawood, A. et al. Banning paraphylies and executing Linnaean taxonomy is discordant and reduces the evolutionary and semantic information content of biological nomenclature. Insect. Soc. 63, 237–242 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-016-0467-1

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