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61–63) It is doubtful whether this could be done by means of design; a language is an evolved system, and when people have tried to design features of language they have almost always failed—although it has to be said that they have usually done so without knowing much about what language is or how it works. But however it came about, any change of this kind would have important social consequences, because it would help to lessen the gap between written language and spoken, and between the commonsense discourse of home and neighbourhood and the elaborated discourse of school and the institutions of adult life.

The English that is written by adults, in most present-day genres, is highly nominalized in just this way. Discourse of this sort is probably familiar to all of us: Key responsibilities will be the investment of all domestic equity portfolios for the division and contribution to the development of investment strategy. (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February 1992, p. 32) But whereas this nominalizing was functional in the language of science, since it contributed both to technical terminology and to reasoned argument, in other discourses it is largely a ritual feature, engendering only prestige and bureaucratic power.

What all of this appears to mean is that monophyly is not a principle scientists can depend on in formal classification. They have to take into account whether they’re dealing with plants or animals, whether the plants are unicellular or complex and whether genetic transfer across species is involved. As Gould comments, classifications of plants may look more like a network than a conventional diversifying bush, which raises a query about the opening sentence of the footnote considered above: ‘Taxonomists insist upon monophyly in formal classification’.