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From: honig@BONNIE.ICS.UCI.EDU ("David A. Honig")
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Why can you specify a species with seven decisions?
Message-ID: <9006290838.aa23173@ICS.UCI.EDU>
Date: 29 Jun 90 15:43:52 GMT
Lines: 27


(Excuse the naivite; I'm not a biologist..)

Classically, you specify the name of species (which is the leaf of
the tree graphing speciation) starting with Kingdom, Phylum, etc.
Now, why should all species be specifiable by just 7 levels?

Is this just human oversimplification?  Am I not
understanding something?  I understand that there
are now Super-orders, classes, etc.  But why is the less than
a dozen branch points in the classification sufficient?
Because there were a certain number of speciating episodes in
common, due to climate, for all living things? (doubtful).

It seems to me that there should be quite a range of species' 'depths'
in the tree of life.

Its kinda like this (apologies to the biologists! :-) : in a unix system,
there are files (species) at just a few levels below root, and there
are files twenty subdirectories below root.  It would be highty suspicious
if most files were found exactly 7 subdirectories below root.

Please email (and publically post if you like) responses to me.
Thanks much.

Confused but interested,
	David