[Taxacom] [TAXACOM] Systematists as holists

[Curtis Clark]

On 2008-04-06 14:49, Bob Mesibov wrote:
> IMHO, it's the social structure of the taxonomic community that's
> holding it back. For reasons that have nothing to do with the subject
> matter - life discovery and documentation - most taxonomists are career
> people embedded in institutions, people who compete for resources both
> within and outside (the drip-feed of research grants) those
> institutions. For many taxonomists, the answer to 'What's to be done?'
> is to train lots more professional taxonomists to take up newly created
> places in those same institutions.
> 
> Probability of success? Nil. It would be a lot smarter to liberate
> taxonomy from its institutional framework and get the bulk of its work
> done in a distributed manner by part-time, non-career taxonomists, work
> anchored by ZooBank and Doug Yanega's visionary website, and mentored
> online by the dying generation of embedded professionals.

As alluring as this feels to me (being in a position where I no longer 
do much taxonomy, and looking forward to a retirement where I can do 
more), I worry about training. The basic skills for Linux are the basic 
skills of OS and application development, and although the mindset is 
different, the skills easily transfer. But biological systematics 
involves two skill sets, a knowledge of organisms and a knowledge of 
classification, that in other areas can be individually a life's work. 
Add to that a heaping helping of genomics, biochemistry, ecology, 
nomenclature, history, and all the other things that taxonomists deal 
with, and it's no wonder that even university-trained taxonomists often 
lack the necessary breadth.

The current paradigm that you outline in the first paragraph I cited 
above certainly fails to address this need, but I don't see how the 
average amateur will ever have the opportunity to develop the necessary 
skills to do modern systematics at more than a cursory level. My 
experience with Wikipedia bears this out, and it also strengthens my 
belief in the broad-scale futility of on-line mentoring (despite the 
occasional specific success).

-- 
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Director, I&IT Web Development                   +1 909 979 6371
University Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona