[Taxacom] Reproducibility of descriptive data

[Bob Mesibov]

Hi, Mike.

Thank you for your explaining your position so clearly. I now see (sorry to be so obtuse) that you tie description and identification tightly together, whereas I don't, so our apparent points of disagreement are (the Taxacom Syndrome) the result of taking at cross-purposes.

Keeping description and ID separate? Sure. An extreme contemporary case would be a specialist in a well-understood taxon who never uses descriptions at all, but relies entirely on barcodes. Fine with me, if there's a good one-to-one correspondence between barcode and Jim Croft's 'Three Things' (sounds very Chinese...). A less extreme case is my millipede 'gonopodology', because besides relying for ID on a mental and real-world album of gonopod images, I also check what authors or redescribers said about the rest of the millipede.

You ask:

"As a taxonomist with direct experience of this subject, do you think (a) that the error rates reported in these studies are abnormally high; or (b) that they are acceptable, and 
there's no point in trying to improve them?"

Well, (b) is a "Have you stopped beating your wife?" question, because like most other taxonomists I try to think of ways to improve the ability of myself and others to do IDs . As for (a), I have no idea, but over many years my experience has been that non-experts rely on experts for critically important IDs, rely on published/online material plus 'confirmatory' advice from experts for less important IDs, and rely on published/online material alone for inconsequential IDs. Which gets back to a theme I weave into a lot of these threads, namely for what uses and for whom do we do taxonomy?

I accept your point about 'comparative' as you use the word, in that it's possible to see a description as useful/useless for *potential* comparisons.

I think the reason I responded so strongly to what you said is lurking in the word 'reproducibility', which is a loaded one, and suggests the 'reproducible results' you either get or don't get in physics and chemistry. You do a melting point measurement on substance X and get a result Y C. If that result is reproducible, anyone else using standard mp-determining apparatus will also get Y.

I don't think descriptive taxonomy can ever be reproducible in this sense, and I think the subject line of this post is a bit of an oxymoron. Obviously you feel differently, and have worked hard to move taxonomic description more towards a 'use this species-determining apparatus and you will accurately ID species Y' state. Let's leave it at that.
-- 
Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and
School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195
Website: http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/mesibov.html