[Taxacom] [TAXACOM] Systematists as holists

[Edwards, G.B.]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned already the situation that
existed at INBio and the associated ALAS Project, with their formal
'parataxonomists' who performed a lot of the functions that Bob
suggested could be handled by people other than the primary taxonomist.
This was certainly a workable scenario as long as the money held out
(always the problem).  Maybe Bob's take on this is one way to get around
the money problem.

-- 
G. B. Edwards  [Your Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman] 
Curator: Arachnida (except Acari), Myriapoda, Terrestrial Crustacea,
Thysanoptera 
Florida State Collection of Arthropods, FDACS, Division of Plant
Industry 
P.O.Box 147100, 1911 SW 34th St., Gainesville, FL 32614-7100 USA 
(352) 372-3505 x194; fax (352) 334-0737; edwardg at doacs.state.fl.us 

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Bob Mesibov
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 7:58 PM
To: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] [TAXACOM] Systematists as holists

I'm not dissuaded by arguments along the lines of

'It takes long training and experience to become a taxonomist, it can't
be left to amateurs'

because I am *not* talking about training amateurs to be taxonomists.

I am talking about breaking up the work that taxonomists do into
components that interested non-professionals can handle, and
distributing that work into online communities of trained or self-made
'component specialists', plugged in to a project network.

The code project model cannot be directly applied to taxonomy, because
the output at higher levels is not very different from the output at
lower levels. Taxonomy-driven fieldwork, illustration, cladistic
analysis and biogeographic analysis are lower-level tasks that
contribute to a very different synthesis at the top level. The Linux
kernel code model applies, though, in that there is a hierarchical
structure (with Mr Torvalds near the top) which tests and debates at
every step up before a new kernel is released (published).

This is precisely the open, democratic process that Doug Yanega has been
arguing for. My contribution to that model is to loosen the restriction
on who participates at each of the levels in the work. All I'm hearing
these days is 'give the professionals more money, that'll fix the
problem'. I don't think that campaign is going to succeed. There aren't
good enough reasons to give the money (most people, remember, don't care
about the diversity of life), and giving the professionals more money is
not the way to enormously expand the taxonomic effort, which is what I
believe is needed.

What we need to do is create flexible work structures in taxonomy which
grow independently and have their own momentum. In earlier posts I
suggested how to populate those structures. Here I just point out that
they cost less, do more and work faster - sounds like FOSS, but I'm
talking about distributed taxonomy.

Start your thinking with something easily divorced from taxonomy sensu
strictu: collection. The grant-funded, once-off field trip you and a
colleague manage to organise after much effort leads to a monograph on
the Thingidae of Somewhere Province two years on. That is *not* an
cost-efficient or effort-efficient way to tackle the global
sampling/documentation crisis. There are people living in Somewhere
Province. Get them to collect for you as part of the Thingidae Network,
a global effort to collect, sort, curate and taxonomise this taxon, in
collaboration with the X, Y and Z Networks doing the same jobs with
other taxa.

I'm not going to get into the role-of-molecular-taxonomy debate here, to
avoid offending the mad-keen tree-builders on this list. Can I just
point out that many taxonomists now send their nucleic acid samples to
Korea to be sequenced, despite the potentially universal *availability*
of sequencers? It's cheaper and more efficient to send the samples to a
specialist doing a component of the taxonomic work.

Professional taxonomists have a choice. They can go down on their knees
year after year and beg for short-term, public or big-private funding in
a competitive environment for achieving limited, short-term goals, or
they can stand up proudly and invite thousands of largely self-funded
contributors around the world to join them in an unlimited, long-term
effort to discover and document life, expedited by the Web.

That would sound airy-fairy if we didn't have Wikipedia and other
projects as examples. It isn't airy-fairy, it's absolutely necessary to
make substantial progress in taxonomy in the face of declining support
for embedded professionals, and a disappearing biota.
-- 
Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
and School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/mesibov.html
---


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