Exist sub-species?????

[Doug Yanega]

Stinger wrote:

>If you use a
>phylogenetic species concept as I do, there can be no subspecies. This
>is because the species is the "minimum diagnosable monophyletic group"

and, perhaps not coincidentally, Richard Jensen followed up with:

>Tom Lammers, a frequent contributer to Taxacom, has written what I believe
>to be an excellent short essay decrying the sway that molecular
>systematics has come to hold on everyone's perception of our discipline.
>He is not attacking molecular systematics, which is one of our most
>powerful tools, but he is expressing concern that its dominance is a
>danger to the health of our science.

Maybe it's just me, but I see a connection here, since - as far as I've
been able to discern (though this may be a misconception, and please feel
free to challenge me on it if you know otherwise) - the majority of
molecular systematists prefer the PSC to other species concepts. If this is
true, and if in 30 years virtually every tenured systematist is molecular,
then it seems likely that no one but ecologists (if anyone) will be using
the BSC any more, and subspecies will be either looked at as some quaint,
archaic concept, or have been replaced by some semantic/conceptual
equivalent used to indicate "geographically separated populations that are
phenotypically but not genotypically distinct" but not given a trinomial.
This prompts me to ask my question of the assembled masses:

Does everyone honestly expect that any form of formal subspecific taxon
designations will survive the test of the coming decades, and if not, why
should any of us bother to designate any more of them? Is there anything
gained by resisting the PSC trend, or should we simply go with it and
elevate all extant *diagnosable* subspecies to species rank, since
diagnosability is the sole practical criterion?

Note that I *do* recognize that diagnosability isn't formally sufficient,
since the PSC also mandates monophyly, but I think we all KNOW that the
practical limitations are such that rarely (if ever) will those of us
concerned with nomenclature have sufficient data to delineate the
phylogenetic relationships of all the populations of a given
"species-level" taxon, and thus be able to state whether a given taxon is
or is not truly monophyletic. We therefore may have to choose among evils:
with about 1 million described taxa, and several million more yet to go,
would we prefer to describe new taxa such that (a) future generations are
likely to blithely ignore our work (witness, for example, the Nomina
Insecta Nearctica, which synonymizes *every* extant subspecific taxon), or
such that (b) our work - our hypotheses of species rank - will stand until
and *unless* they're formally challenged, case by case, with hard data? To
me, this seems likely to come down to just that sort of choice, which may
reduce at its simplest to whether we'd prefer to err on the side of
recognizing many *fewer* species than really exist, or *more*. While I'd
FAR prefer that we didn't have to make such a choice in the first place, I
think we'll be forced to, sooner or later, and I'd prefer the second type
of error, myself.

Awaiting the flames,


Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
                http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82