No subject

[Rodham E. Tulloss]

I concur with the authors of the objection to the proposed registration
plan.  And I think that Joe Laferriere's comments concerning not being
able to tell from a publication whether or not a name is valid are well-taken.
An intermediate position that seems workable might be to leave the require-
ments for valid publication as they are but centralize the listing of the
validly published names to a greater degree...if Hugh Wilson's feeling that
the current situation is inadequate is widely held.  In other words,
centralization need not also imply the bureaucracy in the current proposal.
I have begun to notice on the title page of a few journals a statement that
they are complying with registration.  If the current proposal in its entirety
were not accepted, a requirement that journals submit copies (or some other
summary or set of offprints, etc.) to a central registration entity might
might be acceptable.  The
registration entity would have staff to check that the requirements of
valid publication were met and list the new names, new combinations, etc.
(Neither the original proposal nor this reduced one addresses the fact
that people make mistakes about nomenclatural validity as is evidenced
occasionally in existing lists.)
However, the registration would not create validity, the current rules would
apply.
In the last several ICBN revisions, we have had quite a bit of turmoil introduced
that still has not played its way out.  Certainly in agaricology, we have not
yet seen all the requests for conservation of names that are going to come
about.  I don't want to get into those discussions (now moot for the most part).
However, I do want to suggest that conservative changes (or no change) might
be very valuable to give taxonomists a nomenclatural breathing space.
There are blessed few alpha taxonomists (as we are constantly saying to each
other) and, at present, a number of us are embroiled significantly in nomenclatural
issues created largely by the change in starting date for the names of
our organisms.  To increase the nomenclatural burden while only minimally
improving the situation is not desirable.

Rod Tulloss