[Taxacom] New lizard species

[Bob Mesibov]

"Im sorry, but i'm failing to see why so many people on this forum are up in arms."

Stuart, this is a taxonomy forum. The lizard paper is great (or at least OK) evolutionary biology, but as taxonomy it's junk.

We know that life is extremely diverse, that almost every individual is different from almost every other individual. We know that every individual is related to every other individual through a history of descent with modification. We also know that it's completely impractical and scientifically useless to name every individual. However, we do need to name groups of individuals so we can deal with the group so named for various practical purposes in medicine, agriculture, fishing, forestry, etc etc and a wide range of biological investigations. The job of naming groups for these purposes is done by taxonomists. The job of organising named groups in a classification which (we hope) reflects the history of descent with modification is also done by taxonomists.

These naming and classifying jobs have methodologies and codes of rules. When the methodologies and rules are treated with contempt, as in the lizard paper, we have junk taxonomy. The three new lizard names are little different from those joking scientific names you see in the popular media, like 'Homo suburbensis'.

I personally have no objection to investigators using whatever evidence they can find to reconstruct relationships of lineages. This can be done at any level, from phyla down to individuals. You *do not need to name anything in a phylogeny* to show its hypothesised relationships except the terminals (to show what you used in your analysis, e.g. 'specimen A4143'). The work you've done stands or falls on its merits as tree-building.

At higher taxonomic levels, lineage trees help us make biological classification more genealogical, and naming is a good idea. At lower levels, e.g. populations, we don't have to name everything. Honest, we don't. Check out the Wells & Wellington story referred to in this thread.
-- 
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
Webpage: http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/mesibov.html