[Taxacom] formation of zoological names with Mc, Mac, etc.

[Doug Yanega]

Paul Morris wrote:

>On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:39:25 +0100
>"Francisco Welter-Schultes" <fwelter at gwdg.de> wrote:
>>  Taxon name author strings (genus-species-author-year) are used as
>>  global unique identifiers for species
>
>This is false.  If you use only those four elements you are guaranteed
>to have non-unique identifiers.  To have a high  likelihood of being
>able to uniquely specify a name you need at least 9 elements: genus,
>specific epithet, subspecific epithet, infrasubspecific epithet,
>authorship (including initials), year of publication, presence of
>parenthesies, page, plate, and figure.

That's 10 elements, actually. Calling them essential is misleading, 
as well, as only 6 of them apply to *every* taxon name (subspecific 
epithet, infrasubspecific epithet, plate, and figure only exist for a 
tiny minority of published organismal names). The "parentheses" 
element could be eliminated if you replaced the "genus" with 
"original genus" - which would indeed be appropriate if (a) you're 
tracking all names ever published instead of just "names in present 
use", and (b) you recognize that generic placement beyond the 
original description is subjective and therefore not unique (i.e., 
two databases using different generic placements would have different 
"unique strings" as identifiers for the same taxon).

I also suspect, though maybe Francisco will confirm it, that his 
system uses subspecific epithets and infrasubspecific epithets when 
they exist - but even then, the same problem arises regarding 
subjective changes in rank post-dating the original description, and 
again I'd argue to treat the "epithet" as a single element, given 
exactly as it appeared in the original publication.

>Trying to group data into species using taxon name strings that include
>only a subset of the necessary nomenclatural information guarantees
>that many of your groups will contain information about multiple
>species.   Nomenclature is complex and is full of pathological
>examples.

If we eliminate parentheses as an element, and reduce epithet to a 
single element, however, the only thing genuinely distinguishing your 
remaining criteria from Francisco's is the addition of "page". "Page" 
is not technically sufficient as a criterion; what if an author 
published 3 times in one year, and each time described the same taxon 
on page 2 of each successive work? Then the disambiguating element 
would need to be "citation", of which Publication Title, Volume, Page 
Number, Plate, and Figure would all be subsets. Neither your list nor 
Francisco's contain "citation" as such, so *neither* set of criteria 
results in true disambiguation.

Peace,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              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