[Taxacom] paraphylophobia again

[Barry Roth]

Stephen, thank you for your reply and for the citations.  I might also admit that I was commenting on an essentially peripheral aspect of your posting, and that I do not disagree with the core of your argument.  It is apparent to me that in order for the gigantic task of formal description of undescribed species -- or even the smaller but more urgent subset of species which are at imminent risk and add their weight to local conservation efforts -- to progress, a new economic model must come into play.  Information may, as Stewart Brand said, "want to be free," but the infrastructure for collecting and disseminating it wants and needs compensation.  In this case, that means taxonomists and the journals that publish their work product.  See a related discussion by Malcolm Gladwell (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell) with respect to news content.  The users who benefit from the content should support
 that infrastructure.
 
Barry Roth

--- On Mon, 7/20/09, Stephen Thorpe <s.thorpe at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:


[Barry Roth] How about finding one synapomorphy uniquely shared by Strepsiptera and a subgroup of Insecta?

[reply] What if (a conclusive) one can't be found? How long should we keep looking? How much funding should we chew up in the process? How many other productive lines of biological enquiry should we give up? Let's all stop what we are doing and search for a synapomorphy linking Streps to another group of insecta! :)

[Barry Roth] Without imputing any kind of superstitious outlook to Stephen, this reminds me of the demands of creationists for "transitional forms."

[reply] I am glad you are not imputing any kind of superstitious outlook to me! The specifics of the Streps problem are what makes it appropriate to look for fossil intermediates, for no other approach has worked. You need to read up on recent literature on the topic, such as:

Pohl, H.; Beutel, R.G.; Kinzelbach, R. 2005: Protoxenidae fam. nov. (Insecta, Strepsiptera) from Baltic amber ? a 'missing link' in strepsipteran phylogeny. Zoologica scripta, 34: 57-69.

and also:

Pohl, H.; Beutel, R.G. 2008: The evolution of Strepsiptera (Hexapoda). Zoology, 111: 318-338.

In short: creationism sux, but so does science when it gets too obsessed with answering intractable problems of phylogeny - so why don't we reassess our priorities and do something relatively neutral, like documenting the world's biodiversity? There are many hundreds of undescribed beetles here in N.Z., for example, but at current rates and trends, I fear that they will NEVER all be described...and all the funding is going down the sinks of those for whom Hennig is God (or Yahweh)!

S



Quoting Barry Roth <barry_roth at yahoo.com>:

> How about finding one synapomorphy uniquely shared by Strepsiptera and a subgroup of Insecta?  I'm sorry, but the "search for a missing link" model below seems too limiting.  We estimate phylogenetic relationships of many (probably most) groups of organisms without having intermediates.  Indeed, intermediates present their own kind of taxonomic problem.  Without imputing any kind of superstitious outlook to Stephen, this reminds me of the demands of creationists for "transitional forms."
>  
> Barry Roth
> 
> --- On Sun, 7/19/09, Stephen Thorpe <s.thorpe at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
> 
> The general problem is knowing when to stop and move on to something 
> more productive. Take the Strepsiptera problem, for example. A huge 
> amount of time and resources goes into trying to work out the 
> phylogenetic position of Strepsiptera within Insecta, but it cannot be 
> conclusively solved until a fossil is found which is half-way between 
> a strep and something else.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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