cultural change

[Peter Stevens]

>Steve Shattuck wrote:
>
>>
>>The solution to this problem will require at least two things: cultural
>>change and loss of freedom.  Our cultural practices will need to change
>>because we CANNOT continue to do things the way we've done them in the past
>>- it's just not working.  And we will be forced to give up some freedoms if
>>we really want to be a global community rather than a series of isolated
>>individuals working in our own little vacuums.
>
>I'm presuming (since you weren't explicit) that the cultural change
>you had in mind is electronic publication. I think this one is likely
>to be accommodated within the next decade (if only because
>taxonomists are going broke and can't afford page charges any more).
>I'm presuming that the freedom issue you're referring to is
>registration, and that's going to be a harder sell, though I'm one
>who believes it's absolutely necessary. To a taxonomist it may seem
>like an imposition, certainly, but to those of us who are forced to
>make use of classification, we desperately NEED to have unique
>identifying codes to refer to each named taxon - and having a
>standardized hierarchy would help, too. Just imagine trying to
>organize a library without having the Dewey Decimal System, ISBN
>numbers, or something like it. Well, that's what we have to deal with
>in *our* museums, and that's just not right.
>


A lot of interesting stuff here.  For one, I fully agree with
standardised hierarchies (or, if you are a phylocode exponent at the
higher levels, using particular clade names consistently in
communication).  That is what the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (version
two has just been submitted; little change over version 1 of 1998) is
trying to do, and it is one of the reasons I wanted to put up the
Angiosperm phylogeny website at Missouri Botanical Garden, which also
uses the APG system (with a couple of small elaborations for
teaching). This last go around at the website we added lists of
genera for many families; the synonymy is not authoritative and it is
not up to date, but I hope within a couple of years we can start
developing lists of accepted generic names for families.  In the last
couple of years I have seen Drosera, sundews, dismembered into
several genera, Gnetum split (resurrecting in this case an old
generic name) and Typha (of all things) split into two genera. Do we
need this?

And I also think we have to find a way to junk the dead hand of
history that causes us to waste so much time in taxonomy.  This is no
time to woffle.  (I also speak as a quasi-historian who would be as
happy as a clam is somebody gave me six months to finish some of my
historical work....)  The information will always be there, under
whatever name, but that we should have to chew through the same stuff
time and again when revising groups?   I think it is just plain
silly. I spent a couple of hours this week with a master's student
working through the synonymy of a single species of grass; we didn't
finish. It wasn't a large synonymy, just tricky.

And registration? Well, I, too think and hope that something with
full community support that will have the effect of registration will
evolve over the next few years.  The International Plant Names Index
was a step in this direction, even if it doesn't currently have all
the bells and whistles it was originally hoped it would have.  It is
simply a matter of time and money and programmers.

Peter S.