>> In which case, you couldn't really argue that chinese cabbage is distinct from bok choy, regardless of appearance.
Actually, because I care more about growing and eating than about DNA or even ancestry, yes i do argue that 95% of Chinese cabbage cultivars are
very distinct from Bok Choy. The fact that their patters of DNA overlap is very interesting, but not as useful to a gardener as knowing which one is more likely to be frost-tolerant or prone to bolting the first year.
Try planting Chinese cabbage as early as you should plant Bok Choy, or randomly replace either with turnip greens or broccoli raab in a recipe!
The simpler layman definitions that I stumbled across online mostly didn't lean towards "grouping by ancestry", even for the specific meaning of "Taxonomy" as used in Biology.
Taxonomy (Biology)
"the science dealing with the description, identification, naming, and classification of organisms.
Taxonomy (Biology) -
http://www.biology-online.org/...
(1) The science of finding, describing, classifying, and naming organisms, including the studying of the relationships between taxa
and the principles underlying such a classification.
(2) The classification of organisms in a hierarchical system or in taxonomic ranks (e.g. domain, kingdom, phylum or division, class, genus, species)
based on shared characteristics or on phylogenetic relationships inferred from the fossil record or established by genetic analysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Taxonomy ... is the science of defining groups of biological organisms
on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups."
Taxonomy
"Not to be confused with taxidermy."
But I do see that more technical definitions and some "dictionary" definitions do focus on ancestry. And it makes sense that practicing scientists "have to" focus on things that can be measured and proved. "Natural relationships" based on % shared DNA can be less ambiguous or subject to opinion than "grows and tastes like a turnip".
Taxonomy
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
" the process or system of describing the way in which different living things are related by putting them in groups"
" classification; especially : orderly classification of plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships"
Probably, for bacteria and Brassicas, there is a need for two kinds of classification: genetic/ancestral and functional.
But my all-time favorite explanation of taxonomy is "Not to be confused with taxidermy".
