Would Rosaceae by any other name smell as sweet?

The Panda's Thumb spends most of its time swatting down creationism, especially in its shiny new guise of 'Intelligent Design Theory'. But the truly interesting stuff is real biology, and the Thumb takes time to discuss this as well.

The other day I talked in a very simple way about some of the implication of naming a species. Today, TPT's John Wilkins goes a lot farther, recounting the history of Linnaean classification and talking about a proposed replacement, Phylocode, that would cleave far more closely to phylogenetic history. It's all fascinating stuff, and highly illuminating in pondering whether our classifications of organisms relect some kind of 'reality', or are simply so many names.