To some potential readers of this book the description of Biological
System- atics as an art may seem outdated and frankly wrong. For most
people art is subjective and unconstrained by universal laws. While one
picture, play or poem may be internally consistent comparison between
different art products is meaningless except by way of the individual
artists. On the other hand modern Biological Systematics - particularly
phenetics and cladistics - is offered as objective and ultimately
governed by universal laws. This implies that classifications of
different groups of organisms, being the products of systematics, should
be comparable irrespective of authorship. Throughout this book Minelli
justifies his title by developing the theme that biological
classifications are, in fact, very unequal in their expressions of the
pattern and processes of the natural world. Specialists are imbibed with
their own groups and tend to establish a consensus of what constitutes a
species or a genus, or whether it should be desirable to recognize sub-
species, cultivars etc. Ornithologists freely recognize subspecies and
rarely do bird genera contain more than 10 species. On the other hand
some coleopterists and botanists work with genera with over 1500
species. This asymmetry may reflect a biological reality; it may express
a working practicality, or simply an historical artefact (older erected
genera often contain more species). Rarely are these phenomena
questioned.
