Is there language in cladistics to describe organisms that technically belong to one group but have split to develop such a distinctive evolutionary path that it is no longer useful to describe them as belonging in the group? Like how all tetrapods are technically fish but calling them that isn't useful when trying to distinguish between groups of animals.
Like snakes are technically lizards, but unless you're specifically talking lineages, most people wouldn't include snakes in a conversation about, idk, native lizards in you're area. Even wikipedia says gila monsters are the "only venomous lizards in the US", which is true by all metrics except cladistics.
(BTW I'm NOT trying to make a "birds aren't dinosaurs argument. IMO I don't think birds have even evolved that distinctly from dinosaurs to even argue they should be called something else. I mean look at them, they look like freakin dinosaurs.)
I mean, to be fair to snakes, here, there are a LOT of legless lizards that don't fall into snakes, so they don't actually seem that different either!
but yeah no, there is no term for that, because that's not how evolution works. Tetrapods have a huge evolutionary path, but it's still a part of the path that Sarcopterygians took, because that's where we came from.
Evolution is a constant series of changes, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but there's no way for us to pick one or some changes and know that those are important enough to cause a distinct evolutionary journey. I don't think anyone alive in the Cretaceous could have guessed that the tiny flying dinosaurs would be the only ones around in 66 million years, but here we are!
We have to keep it as monophyletic groups because that's the closest we get to describing objective reality, objective evolutionary groups. Also, we are all impacted heavily by our ancestry.
This traces back to a cross-disciplinarian philosophy called Foundation Theory. Where you start, or come from, or found yourself on, affects everything that comes later. You cannot fix a building with a rotten foundation, for example, because that whole building depends on that foundation
the fact that tetrapods are lobe-finned fish traces back to that. So many aspects of tetrapod anatomy only make sense when you remember we're fish
the foundation of tetrapods is a fun friend crawling up to shore. We can't erase that, or ignore it, because then we're missing key aspects of the puzzle - the foundation of it, really.
And if you want to go deeper, the foundation of ALL life, we can see how much of our quirks trace just to being carbon based, or bound in membranes, or use DNA instead of RNA, or -
the list goes on
So, alas, nay. You never leave a group you're a part of. You can never remove yourself from your foundation.
