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The PhyloCode: doomed?

The PhyloCode is a proposal to register definitions of taxa. It is billed as the first serious advance in biological nomenclature since the work of Linnaeus in the 1750s. Not only should systematists adhere to rigid codes and rules concerning names of new species and genera, but the definitions of all taxa, species and above, will have to be registered and fixed. This will lead to chaos.

I have written a rebuttal to the PhyloCode concept, which was published in Biological Reviews in November 2000. This may be viewed in an html version, or downloaded as a pdf.

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