Registration of names (fwd)

[Karstad-Schueler]

"William R. Anderson" <wra at umich.edu> wrote:

> Bill Buck and I have drafted a short argument against registration of
> names,

> As now envisaged, registration would be a mandatory part of valid
> publication...

> For most groups of plants and fungi, there is already an excellent
> system  for recording & reporting new names. It is decentralized
>  and voluntary, but it works remarkably well.

>  This raises two obvious questions: If we now have a system that works,
>  why should we change it? And if we do change it, will
> the new system be better than the old, or will it bring unexpected
> disadvantages?

>  The problem with registration lies in the fact that it would be
> mandatory, and in the potential consequences of that fact. While
> registration has been presented and generally perceived as a neutral
> mechanism devised for purely innocent purposes, it is important for all
> taxonomists to understand what a significant, even radical, departure
> this would be from the Code of Nomenclature that has served us so well
> for so long.

In 1995 I wrote, about planning the organization of biological monitoring
schemes: "The example of biological nomenclature, which governs the
naming of the Earth's biodiversity with minimal legislation and little
enforcement or jurisprudence, inspires a naturalist to believe that
autonomous anarchist systems can order large enterprises."

Mandatory registration of names would degrade nomenclature from its
present status as the greatest anarchist achievement of the human
intellect, to just another unimaginative and error-ridden bureaucracy.
Systematists have traditionally believed that the hierarchical
bureaucracies they have struggled to labour within represent an
infinitely less efficient way to order human activity than the
egalitarian hypothesis-testing scientific rules that ordered their work:
publish, synonomize, revise, review. Surely the present era, when museum
after museum is crippled by bureaucracy and commercialization run amuk,
is not the time to introduce more bureacracy into systematics: rather it
is time to insist that other institutions learn from the example of
biological nomenclature to become more democratic and less hierarchical.

Fred Schueler
curator.
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         Eastern    Ontario    Biodiversity    Museum
                Grenville Co, Ontario, Canada
(RR#2 Oxford Station, K0G 1T0) (613)258-3107   bckcdb at istar.ca
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