nomenclatoral evils

[Jacqueline Soule]

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
>


Richard has a very valid point here, the numerals may make it so much
easier to deal with the species and genera.  Just in case some future
taxonomists want to go back to latin, we could use numerals which
correspond to the location of the letter in the Latin alphabet.  Thus,
Tagetes (a genus near and dear to my heart) would become
2017520519.

2017520519-5185320 cannot be mistaken for
2017520519-1612021121, its all in the morphology of the disk florets!

Or they could simply be given numbers such as 2017520519-1, etcetera.
1-4, being in the same subgenus, a different subgenus from 5-56.

Perhaps further punctuation needs to be worked out.