> I do not favor Mike's proposed revision (of the definition of > "taxon") for the following reason: some people view clades/higher > taxa not as monophyletic groups of organisms but as monophyletic > groups of species. They're wrong. "Clade" = "an ancestor and all its descendants", even if that's a small part of a species or partially overlaps with one or several species. The PhyloCode allows the naming of LITUs, as it should. Besides, under most species concepts, not only are "speciation" and "cladogenesis" not synonyms*, but neither is even a subset of the other; inevitably, then, clades will usually contain entire species and parts of other species under those species concepts. * Although lots of people, even in the primary literature, use "speciation" when they mean "cladogenesis". It's as if almost nobody even knew the latter term.
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