Art On Linnaean Taxonomy

CLADISTICS MASTER RACE

 

Linnaean classifies based on characteristics, so that puts it above cladistics.

 

???
The characteristics we choose are arbitrary. To put it in perspective, take extinct animals. Linnaean Taxonomy didn't formulate around the idea that things changed over time and had gradual gradients of changes, which is why it's characteristic based. For example, if you want to define an extinct creature as a bird, you can go back all the way to Ornithodira [birds, the rest of Dinosauria (depending on how you define bird, as birds might not be dinosaurs, but rather dinosaurs are birds), and pterosaurs], or if you're really stretching it, Archosauria [Ornithodira and it's relatives (Avemetatarsalians) and stem-crocodiles] (or if you bend the rules by a fuckton, you can even get to Archosauromorpha, which debatably includes turtles. jury's still out.) I don't know about you, but this doesn't look like a bird.

Spoiler: totally legit bird

(I mean, maybe if you try really, really, really hard) (also this thing is surprisingly cute)

As you can see, Linnean taxonomy in the context of Darwinian evolution breaks down, as trait homology screws up how we define things like "feather" and "scale". However, in Cladistics, you have a hard, defined line at which you can define things; common ancestry. Granted, classic terms like "bird" and "mongoose" are still Linnaean and as such undefined, it really just falls under personal preference and doesn't matter. Personally, I like to call Avemetatarsalia (stem-birds; all animals more closely related to birds than crocs) the clade for "bird" because I like grouping shit together (same with how I'll call Plesiosaurs turtles and Mosasaurs snakes).