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

[Jim Croft]

Well... Francisco is right in that people do it, and you are right in
that it is not a valid thing to do.

But whatever we do with the name/author/date/publication/page/etc
concatenation, we will never anchor the species.  We will only anchor
the name. (and to do this we probably do not need the author at all,
just the place of publication and the page ;)  To anchor the species
we are into the murky realm of concepts and secondary references by
authors who did not coin the name.

To me there is a bottom line here.  Even though it is often presented
as such, the author (and date), is not part of the species/taxon name.
 It is an attribute of a reference to that name.  The original
reference is just a special and particularly interesting case.

If we want a bombproof unique identifier, somewhat ironically taxonomy
and nomenclature does not seem to provide it.

Perhaps taxonomy really is more of an art than a science?  ;)

jim


On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 6:14 AM, Paul J. Morris<mole at morris.net> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> -Paul
> --
> Paul J. Morris
> Biodiversity Informatics Manager
> Harvard University Herbaria/Museum of Comparative Zoölogy
> mole at morris.net  AA3SD  PGP public key available
>
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