[Taxacom] "Bar Code" can track Nature's Inventory

[Doug Yanega]

>Hi Taxacomers,
>
>An article in today's Edmonto Journal mentions that
>U of Guelph and Rockerfeller U researchers have
>paved the way for cataloguing every living thin on
>Earth.

They've been claiming this for years, and there are still a great 
many people who feel the claims are grossly overstated. The problem 
can be summed up in a very simple analogy; if you and I have 
different fingerprints, does that mean we belong to different 
species? Humans and armadillos are the only taxa on the planet that 
can be infected by leprosy; does that mean we are the same species?

Determining what is and is not a species requires criteria OTHER than 
the sequence of the COI gene. No single character is ever going to 
tell us when things are or are not distinct species. Especially since 
some organisms evidently have multiple copies of the COI gene, each 
evolving independently. That makes COI a bad standard of reference.

So, if what the "bar coders" were claiming is that once we have 
INDEPENDENTLY determined which biological entities are and are not 
species, that we could THEN go in, sequence them, and use the 
resulting sequences to *recognize* them, that would be a fairly 
reasonable claim. What is not reasonable is claiming that because two 
sampled organisms have a different sequence, they must be different 
species (or the converse - that identical sequences indicate the same 
species).

By no means is this the clean, simple thing the press releases make 
it sound like.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        /Dept. of Entomology         /Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521-0314
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
    Skype: Dyanega               http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82