Article 71

[Robert Robbins]

But who would decide which organisms get the preferred numbers, like
primes or perfect squares?

And, in these times of concerns about nomenclatural offense, deciding what
critter or plant would get 666 should be especially challenging.  For my
two cents, I suggest embedding 666 in the quantitative uninomial for all
newts...



On Thu, 16 Mar 1995, Richard H. Zander wrote:

> Regarding the evils of present nomenclature, one might accuse
> binomialism as a root cause of much trouble. If we gave each basic unit
> of taxonomy a number instead of a name that required a decision about
> what group it belonged to, we could decouple nomenclature and changes in
> classification due to advances in phylogenetic systematics.
> For instance, conservationists, ecologists and lawyers would applaud our
> giving the tomato a scientific uninomial, say 453456798, that would not
> change with regrouping from Lycopersicon to Solanum and back again. With
> computerization, why, we could even do it!
>
> Richard Zander
> Buffalo Museum of Science
> visbms at ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu



ÿÿ    Re: Article 71                                                         R